Ubisoft aren’t satisfied with hoovering up all of your open-world hours. Nor can they live simply taking up your multiplayer time with knights, rollerbladers and spec ops tactical warfare. Now, with XDefiant, they’re coming for your free-to-play shooter minutes too, using their own gun-based franchises as the starting point. They’ll be hoping, as Ubisoft always do, to climb to the pinnacle of this particular genre. We’ve gone hands on ahead of this week’s closed beta.
XDefiant is a 6v6 team-based shooter, with each player able to select and customise their loadout starting with one of five Factions. These Factions are all taken from Ubisoft’s franchises, whether they’re shooters themselves or more open world jaunts. There’s the Cleaners from The Division, Phantoms from Ghost Recon, Libertad from Far Cry, Echelon from Splinter Cell and Dedsec from Watch Dogs, all lending their own individual predilections for armed warfare.
They’re equivalent to classes, with Faction Abilities the elements that set each of them apart, beginning with a series of fire-related attacks for the Cleaners through to Dedsec’s ability to hack enemy abilities or deploy Spiderbots that stun your opponent. Each Faction also has a couple of different abilities to choose from, meaning that there’s likely a way to build the perfect setup for your playstyle, and that it’s going to be interesting to see how well Ubisoft balances all of them as the game works through its beta phases to a full release.
Maps are similarly taken from each of the five franchises, and it’s cool to have elements like The Division’s New York sidling up to Far Cry’s zoo. Chances are you won’t have too long to take in the sights though, as the combat here is fast and frenzied, with death coming quickly if you’re not acutely aware of your surroundings and the potential dangers lurking around each corner. The time-to-kill is fairly low, making encounters brief and punchy, and you’ll likely know straight away if that’s going to suit your fragging needs.
The beta test featured five different mode types for us to get stuck into, and these are all tried and tested variants of genre staples. Domination and Occupy see teams trying to control different zones, while Escort tasks you with defending against or guiding an explosive-laden walker through to its target. Zone Control is similar in that you aim to stop your opponents from making their way from area to area, with the push and pull of attack and defense proving to be nicely weighted.
Escort is an early favourite, even if it is basically the same thing we’ve seen in Overwatch and umpteen other shooters over the years. Still, the different Faction types and their abilities keep each encounter taut and exciting, and I was dragged into the one-more-go compulsion that Ubisoft will need for XDefiant to succeed.
As a free-to-play shooter XDefiant features all of the progression, challenges and Battle Pass tiers that you’d expect. Playing and winning matches earns you XP, as does achieving certain milestones like getting a particular number of kills with a set weapon. You also level up each weapon, gaining upgrades, and from here you can nab more characters as well, with these locked behind a series of kills via particular Faction-type abilities. Nothing here feels incongruous, but there are no clear signs of how much any of these things will eventually cost if you don’t want to grind your way to unlocking them.
XDefiant is a smart, snappy multiplayer shooter, and it’s fairly frictionless in its design choices. I do wonder if anyone feels incredibly strongly about any of these Factions, especially without the actual characters taken from each of the series. I imagine we’ll see skins for characters like Sam Fisher, Aiden Pearce and Vaas along the way, and I think XDefiant would benefit from the immediate injection of character that they’d bring with them. As it stands, one of the main draws will be that DedSec is a faction that needs to be unlocked through the beta, with progression carrying through to the full release for those that invest the time and effort.
That said, I really enjoyed my hands-on time here, and XDefiant’s smooth and satisfying gameplay matched to an approachable progression system could well mean Ubisoft find free-to-play success in the near future. There’s also still time to find ways to add a tower or two to climb – everyone knows that’s the best bit, right?
