After playing a closed test which I reasonably enjoyed two years ago, my expectations for XDefiant weren’t super high. While my experience had been positive, everything I heard about the following tests and closed betas was that it was all heading towards enticing the Call of Duty crowd. Thankfully, the final release of the game isn’t exactly that.
The first thing that’s apparent after a couple of matches is that Ubisoft San Francisco was smart enough to distance the game from the modern CoD formula and instead focus on the more classical feeling that many twitch shooter series have gradually lost. While XDefiant has a voice of its own to a certain degree, it mostly feels like a very improved version of Black Ops 4, and I mean that in the best possible way.
Let me preface this piece by saying it’s stupid to try to avoid the CoD comparisons. Ubisoft very much wanted its piece of that cake with this title, and that’s part of the reason why it’s been tested and tweaked to hell and back. Thankfully, unlike cancelled online shooters like Hyper Scape and The Division: Heartland, the publisher might have a winner with this one.
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