HomeFeaturesTom Clancy’s XDefiant
Ubisoft’s arena shooter XDefiant needs to do more to stand out from the crowdDifferent or better, pick one
Different or better, pick one
After two hours ofXDefiant, I came away with a rather different thought in my mind than I expected. More than anything, I was impressed at just how good we have it in the multiplayer FPS genre at the moment.Apex Legends,Warzone 2,Overwatch 2,Valorant,Rainbow Six Siege. That’s some unbelievably tough competition.XDefianthas to either give players something completely different, or absolutelynailthe basics. 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.
Tom Clancy’s XDefiant - Worldwide RevealWatch on YouTube
Tom Clancy’s XDefiant - Worldwide Reveal
You’ve got the Echelon, fromSplinter Cell- they’re the flankers. Then there’s the Cleaners fromThe Division- they’re the DPS. Libertad hails from theFar Cryseries, they’re your support characters. Phantoms, fromGhost Recon, are your tanks. And Deadsec are the hackers, fromWatch Dogs. 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. 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…
Each faction has a passive trait, an Ultimate ability (called an Ultra), and two quite similar abilities to choose between per life. There are different characters within each faction, but they’re purely cosmetic (and therefore meaningless in my book). 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.
My first several games were true arena shooter experiences, with familiar game modes like Team Deathmatch, Domination, and Occupy. It was hectic as all hell, mainly because none of us knew the maps very well and kept running headlong into enemy spawns. Most players were going round first with an M4 and then the AK-47 once they’d unlocked it. I opted for the SMG route instead, rushing in with my invisibility and melting Cleaners and Phantoms with my Vector SMG. 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. 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.
The maps were the best part of XDefiant in my mind. It’s hard to make decent-looking maps that play well and get you interested in exploring its options.
But I’ve never been a fan of those sorts of game modes in shooters. I like to play smart, and games like TDM reward rushing in and getting a couple of kills before dying. 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. 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. I hate that. Always have, always will. It’s messy, unintuitive, and leads to unjust deaths.
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. A carbon copy of the Escort mode inOverwatch 2, we were tasked with either pushing a payload down a long track, or stopping the other team from pushing it to the end. I enjoyed this mode a lot more because it felt like there were actual consequences to dying. If someone died, they’d be sent back to the last checkpoint, rather than just spawning back in the action a moment later. It gave more opportunities to work as a team, rather than go off and play your own game under the guise of working together with your allies.
But look at me. I’m not even talking about XDefiant anymore, am I? I’m talking about staple game modes in tonnes of different arena shooters. That’s the trouble with XDefiant. There’s really not much to grab onto and think,thisright here is the game’s identity. This is why I’d play this game. Instead I was just left thinking, “Yep. It’s a vidyagame.” Is it gonna pull me away from Apex? Hell no.
