XDefiant is a confident shooter that’s far more than a Call of Duty knockoff

XDefiant, on paper, is cynical to the point of parody.

A free-to-play multiplayer shooter, with a huge whiff of Call of Duty coming off of it, featuring an in-game shop stuffed to bursting with credits to buy and skins to spend them on. Not only that, the cast of the game are all members of factions largely from Ubisoft‘s Clancyverse. But once you start playing the game, all of that sits firmly in the background.

XDefiant is a fast, fluid shooter that feels straight out of the golden age of console FPS games. It’s like a remake of an Xbox 360 Black Ops game that never existed. It’s simple, the guns feel great, and, most vitally of all, it gave us that “one more match” itch.

The multiplayer-only game is currently in its preseason. At the time of publication, there are five game modes, all of which have equivalents in other shooters. There’s Domination, there’s an equivalent to Call of Duty’s Hardpoint, and there’s even an Overwatch-style escort game type. While it loses points for bringing very little to the table in that sense, by having five modes instead of 15, all game types are well populated.

Perhaps most interestingly for a game that has Call of Duty so rooted in its makeup, is that there’s no Team Deathmatch. The iconic first-person shooter multiplayer mode is entirely missing, with its closest equivalent being the game’s version of Kill Confirmed.

We’re in two minds about this. On one hand, it’s good that players get to try a wider variety of modes, and might end up finding something that they like more than TDM, but on the other, players are playing objective modes like it’s Team Death Match. As a result, we end up screaming ourselves into laryngitis as players refuse to get on the point, or refuse to move between points as a team.

In this way, Team Death Match serves as a creche. A cage to lock the feral children that can’t comprehend the complexity of the payload moving when you stand close to it. The number of times we’d lose a match of escort because our team was trying to improve their K/D while the poor payload had been left to wander about themselves was maddening.

You do get far more points and experience for playing the objective and doing the things you are supposed to be doing, but the game could do a better job at punishing those who don’t. Perhaps instead of a player of the game, end the match with a highlight reel of players that didn’t come within the same postcode as the objective, then perma-ban their accounts.

The fact that the game has gotten us quite this riled up is a great sign. XDefiant feels tremendous when things are going your way. The shooting is snappy and precise, and the time-to-kill is the right mix of satisfaction without you feeling like you have absolutely no recourse if you don’t get the first shot away.

There are currently five factions in the game: The Cleaners from The Division, Libertad from Far Cry, Echelon from Splinter Cell, DeadSec from Watch Dogs, and the Phantoms from Ghost Recon Phantoms (us neither). Each of the factions comes with class abilities, as well as an ultimate.

XDefiant could feature in the next decade of Ubisoft Forward live streams. It’s so easy to see this taking the place of For Honor or Rainbow Six: Seige as the live service that chugs along for years. For all their strange projects, Ubisoft has a good track record of supporting games like this for a long time, and they absolutely should.

At launch, DeadSec is locked, however players can either buy the faction or earn them through playing the game. This is the perfect compromise and one we hope they continue. It is pretty funny seeing these characters you don’t know running around in Ubisoft cosplay, but each faction’s abilities are unique enough that it was fun to swap between them and find what fit our play style.

Apparently, there will be four more factions during the game’s first year. Our fingers are crossed for a Rayman faction whose special ability is that they don’t take damage to the arms or the legs. Maybe an Assassin’s Creed faction that has a pair of hidden blades. A Just Dance faction. Ubisoft should get as weird as possible with it.

Similarly, the game’s maps are based on the Ubisoft expanded universe. You’ll be fighting through Nudle (the Watch Dogs version of Google) or Echelon HQ. It does sting somewhat that the game is so Splinter Cell heavy when there hasn’t been a new entry in the series in over a decade, but if it gets Sam Fisher back in the public’s imagination, we won’t complain.

XDefiant could feature in the next decade of Ubisoft Forward live streams. It’s so easy to see this taking the place of For Honor or Rainbow Six: Seige as the live service that chugs along for years. For all its strange projects, Ubisoft has a good track record of supporting games like this for a long time, and it absolutely should.

This has the raw ingredients of an excellent first-person shooter, even if it’s a bit rough and ready at launch. More factions and more game modes are all it really needs to remain a permanent fixture in our gaming rotation, and the stranger it gets with it, the better. When can I play as a ship from Skull and Bones?