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