So I moved onto the Escort game mode, which I stayed with until the end of my two hours with Tom Clancy's Smash Bros. It's messy, unintuitive, and leads to unjust deaths. Also, there was the traditional issue of spawn-swapping, where one team pushes far enough into the other's spawn that the game switches the teams' spawn points. There were opportunities to play smart, particularly as the Echelon - but it meant that despite getting lots of multi-kills and a very strong K/D ratio, I was invariably in the bottom half of the scoreboard compared to those who just charged in like Vinnie Jones, The Juggernaut Bitch. I like to play smart, and games like TDM reward rushing in and getting a couple of kills before dying. It's hard to make decent-looking maps that play well and get you interested in exploring its options.īut I've never been a fan of those sorts of game modes in shooters. The maps were the best part of XDefiant in my mind. It ain't no Overwatch, but the maps were easy to understand, fun to explore, and filled with opportunities for interesting flank attacks and escapes. It was mindless rinse-repeat fun, and probably the best part of it all was the map design, which is actually very solid from what I saw.

I opted for the SMG route instead, rushing in with my invisibility and melting Cleaners and Phantoms with my Vector SMG. Most players were going round first with an M4 and then the AK-47 once they'd unlocked it. It was hectic as all hell, mainly because none of us knew the maps very well and kept running headlong into enemy spawns. My first several games were true arena shooter experiences, with familiar game modes like Team Deathmatch, Domination, and Occupy. It felt cheesy, but it was fun as long as I was on the right end of the pistol. Echelon gave me the ability to turn mostly invisible at will, and my Ultra revealed every enemy on the map and gave me an extremely powerful pistol with which I could go around scoring multi-kills with ease. Along with Libertad, it seemed like the strongest class by quite a margin, and over the next two hours I'd be proven correct, as more and more matches were filled up by these two factions. So off I went, running around unknown maps, popping heads, dying, and respawning barely a second later. Players can hop between factions at will before respawning, Overwatch-style, and you can mix and match loadouts too with a gun progression system lifted straight from Call Of Duty. There are different characters within each faction, but they're purely cosmetic (and therefore meaningless in my book). If the intention was to promote interest in all these other Ubisoft titles, then surely you could have these factions a tad more inspiring? Choose your flavour of generic FPS role! We've got vanilla, double vanilla, vanilla lite.Įach faction has a passive trait, an Ultimate ability (called an Ultra), and two quite similar abilities to choose between per life. Tell me, Ubisoft - did anyone actually ask for this? Of course the idea isn't intrinsically bad, but it certainly makes you question the decision when each of these factions has been reduced to a stereotypical FPS role. And Deadsec are the hackers, from Watch Dogs. Phantoms, from Ghost Recon, are your tanks. Libertad hails from the Far Cry series, they're your support characters. Then there's the Cleaners from The Division - they're the DPS. You've got the Echelon, from Splinter Cell - they're the flankers. A free-to-play first-person game with several familiar arena and escort-style modes, a bunch of three-lane maps, a medley of familiar guns and attachments, and - brace yourself for the fascinating twist - five factions (read: classes), each one taken from a different Ubisoft game series. Essentially, this is the vanilla ice cream of arena shooters. Clean movement, solid gunplay, easy to dive into.

According to executive producer Mark Ruban, XDefiant was the result of their desire to reignite players' love for classic fast-paced arena shooters. Our time with XDefiant was prefaced by a short prerecorded livestream introducing us to the game and the philosophy underpinning its development. It's opted for the second path, and having played several matches against a medley of press people and content creators, I'm not convinced Ubisoft's new arena shooter is up to the challenge. XDefiant has to either give players something completely different, or absolutely nail the basics. That's some unbelievably tough competition. Apex Legends, Warzone 2, Overwatch 2, Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege. More than anything, I was impressed at just how good we have it in the multiplayer FPS genre at the moment. After two hours of XDefiant, I came away with a rather different thought in my mind than I expected.

Is xdefiant good