An Immersive World Open To Explore, With Rewarding Missions and Loot To Find, Even With Bugs It's Still Enjoyable
Defiance is the B movie of massively multiplayer games: rickety and unrefined, yet a good time all the same.
Defiance is a difficult game to wrap your head around. That's not because it's all that complicated, but rather because it's just so much fun, even though none of the elements are done particularly well. Defiance is a massively multiplayer shooter in which every aspect is merely decent at best, yet it somehow pieces the jagged elements together into an entertaining picture as you pursue one challenge after another across its postapocalyptic landscape. What a shame that the trek is interrupted not just by the squishy kinds of bugs that you like to kill with guns and grenades, but technical kinds of bugs that have you cursing and rolling your eyes.
Look beyond the hitches and the jittering frame rates, and you discover a game with a scrappy attitude and a tight handle on what a massively multiplayer world needs to keep you coming back in spite of the frustrations. What is this world? Well, it's Earth, as it happens--more specifically, the San Francisco Bay Area. An alien war has ended, and an uncertain peace between exhausted factions remains. The decrepit remnants of an annihilated fleet of spaceships orbit the planet, occasionally plummeting to the land beneath, and drawing in treasure hunters eager to scour the remaining debris for valuable commodities. Terrestrial and extraterrestrial plant life have merged, causing bizarre purple flowers to grow from the gnarled branches that corkscrew above crumbling highways and rusting copied-and-pasted factories.
You shouldn't come to Defiance to be immersed in the world, which looks too monotone to be all that compelling. Ruinous environments can have their own kind of disastrous beauty, but this vision of Earth lacks the tense atmosphere and visual variety of gaming's best ravaged lands. You might become invested in this world in spite of its mundane looks, however, depending on your level of interest in the SyFy television show of the same name. Story-based missions feature the vague likenesses of characters from the show, and future story missions are promised, but stiff facial animations and inconsistent voice acting--not to mention a lot of cheesy (in the bad way) dialogue--make it hard to whip up any excitement over the narrative in spite of an abundance of cutscenes.
Massively multiplayer online games have trod in alien territory before, though MMOGs remain a rarity on consoles. Nonetheless, Defiance’s structure is a familiar one. The game pushes you from from one task to the next, having you clear meadows of giant hellbug swarms, free captured prisoners from their bonds, collect data from computer terminals, and so forth. You perform most of these missions in the open world, though key assignments might send you into instanced areas meant only for you and your groupmates.
Defiance is not a typical role-playing game, however, but a shooter through and through, so while you have special skills to perform, you can generally concentrate on aiming at your target and pulling the trigger. You initially choose one of four powers so that you can run really fast, go invisible, create a ghostly decoy, or enhance weapon damage. From there, the power grid expands, allowing you to earn and improve lots of passive perks, though you can equip only as many perks as your loadout allows, and eventually you can unlock the other powers to play around with.
These skills are called EGO powers, named after the Environmental Guardian Online artificial intelligence fused with your body. This AI is Defiance's version of Halo's Cortana, though EGO makes a far more annoying companion than Cortana, what with the sharp treble of her voice and the repetitious line readings that don't necessarily make sense in every context. (Do hellbugs really call in reinforcements, as if they have tiny radios strapped to their heads?) But you'll be glad of the abilities she grants you, which aren't very thrilling to activate or watch, but are nonetheless useful in battle. Need to shake off a flame-spewing munchkin? Distract him with your decoy, and shoot the fuel supply strapped to his back. In over your head? Turn invisible and make a quick getaway.
It isn't the powers that make for rewarding progression in Defiance, however; it's the weapons. There is a cornucopia of choices, and once you get a taste of each gun type, you'll be pleased that your inventory is constantly filling with so many deadly possibilities. Simple pistols and machine guns are soon upgraded with modifications you purchase and earn, or are replaced with similar weapons infused with effects like fire and poison. Launchers come in all sorts of varieties. You might be able to lock on to your target, or perhaps your payload explodes in midair and spews fire onto your enemies beneath. Infectors cause bugs to spawn within your victims and eat away at their flesh; biomagnetic guns allow you to siphon health from foes and grant it to friends.
And so your drive to continue playing is fueled by the ever-present possibility of a new gun, a new variant, or a modification that enhances the bond to your current weapon of choice. That bond is then broken when a shiny new toy makes the old, newly obsolete weapon a relic of the past, though weapons remain surprisingly effective for some time. In fact, the gap in weapon effectiveness that you usually feel in a persistent-world game as you level up isn't so pronounced in Defiance, due in part to how well enemies scale based on how many players are in the vicinity.
The gentle progression curve allows developer Trion Worlds to take you on a tour of its world without dividing it into territories that cater to players of specific levels. Reaching one end of the county doesn't mean having to fight your way to some arbitrary level limit, which makes Defiance feel more freeing than other online worlds, even though it doesn't cover the exhaustive amounts of real estate other games do. That isn't to say that Defiance doesn't feel appropriately large, or doesn't give you a lot to do; the world map is dotted with orange waypoints that lure you to vehicular speed challenges and side missions, and white waypoints that indicate vendors promising special guns for sale.
Kevin VanOrd is a lifelong RPG lover and violin player. When he isn't busy building PCs and composing symphonies, he watches American Dad reruns with his fat cat, Ollie.
Lots of issues, support takes 1 to 2 days to fix which in some cases you cant keep playing till they get to you due to stuck/frozen mission. Was very addicting but I wasted a great deal of money buying the season pass, main game, premium edition (in error I thought it was the main game) and lots spent in world on upgrades only to have critical errors on many missions after already putting a lot of effort in. This is still Beta if not Alpha in my opinion.
game sucks, dont waste your money on it played since beta and its only getting worse 'nuff said
2 Like Kevin, do you ever update a review/score based on the issues you complained about being addressed? If, let's say, a patch fixes 60% of your issues, wouldn't that warrant a review revision? I think that would be a beneficial thing to do and even have an icon that indicates an updated review. It would have traction in terms of clicks and be beneficial for the masses. It also, might increase your reviewer stock. ;) Thanks.
1 Like This is yet again one of those reviews that are now downright obsolete. Don't get me wrong, a lot of it is still accurate. But almost all of the technical issues mentioned in this review have been fixed since the recent big patch.
I also feel this is another review where the review score in no way reflects the tone of the actual review. If I had not seen the score before reading, I would have guessed this game got a 7 or 7.5 easy.
I bought this game on release day, am I disappointed? No, it is fun for what it is. Would I suggest someone else pay $60 to play it? Probably not.
@speedfog
I can imagine him throwing a tantrum every time someone kills him "WHAT! WHO THE FUCK JUST KILLED ME, FUCK THIS GAME ARRRRR"
3 Like I got it 3 days after release and was really upset at the issues, I couldn't even finish the tutorial because of the lag. They were kicking people off for maintenance all the time. Now I'm able to play 4 hrs without issues. I even emailed them about mission issues, got a reply 4 days later stating they were going to fix this in the next patch... sure enough 2 days ago in the patch notes it was listed. They even sent a email to make sure I wasn't having the same issue. When I logged into my account I had 10% bonus on everything, some weapons etc. They really care about the customers and are trying to make this game better. They actually listen. I cant remember a time I bought a game that had issues and was compensated for it, to me as a consumer that speaks volume about these guys. This game is a great game and how does someone give a game so huge a review? I have over 100hr in and Im not even done with the main mission and contracts etc. You cant really review a game without finishing it correct? Plus he played it on pc and compared it to other pc mmo's.... then gave it a extra .5 because the graphics???? On console it should be different because there isnt many mmo's on a console is my point. Kevin's reviews suck balls. I think they should watch for all the patches and bug fixes before giving numbers. Its a great game and dont let reviews sway you away from it.
1 Like Three days after I played this game I went straight back to fallout new vegas. The story line is poor, the quests are the same damn thing over and over, and the environments are average at best.
@Hiyaplayer15 I love Fallout, but I love playing with friends, meeting new people and participating in shenanigans more. Were you trying to play an MMO as a single-player game?
1 Like i bought bioshock infinite and this at the same time , didnt even had the chance to start bioshock cause defiance is sooo addicting
1 Like So uh... I assume this is one of those games you pay for first and play later? Or is this F2P? Seems like an important bit of info, something that definitely should be mentioned in a review... although it isn't(mentioned that is.)
1 Like Still waiting on things to return like the capture and hold pvp thing so I can focus on those goals but all in all great game. After finishing the campaign trying to do all the goals is great I think, played on it almost every day since it came out, great value and great gameplay really sucks you in, won't be finished till all goals are finished. :)
3 Like i've played for 10 hours (top notch zone) and i didn't found all these bugs (some bugs not so many).. the iportant thing is not graphics or facial expression but how much the game entertain you. i find myself playing all night long and skip work just to play more.. i'm tired of game like crisys e co. with ultra mega super graphics but that leaves with empty. it's a great game, it's fun to be played with friends (side mission with role is wonderful) and i hope more ppl come to the server and enjoy the game. arkfall hunt is pure madness and i'm proud to be part of it. bugs are present in every game but if the editor is a big one then the scores are >8. lamest review ever
1 Like The game if it was made differently it would have been good not great or a breakthrough in gaming,but the way it is made and played ,well.....................it sucks, even the cutscenes are very plasticky as I might say. The review score is tooooooo high give it a 3.5 and that's making the producers happy. Very disappointed indeed.
2 Like There is a very strange gap between user scores and critic scores with this game, both on this site and on Metacritic. It's kind of puzzling. I feel like critics are universally rating this game a full point or more lower than warranted for some inexplicable reason.
1 Like Totally agree with this review. I enjoy the game, but it's buggy, laggy, lacking any real or refined storyline, and at times boring because of the awfully static world.
Like I said, I enjoy the game, but it's hardly worth more than a 7.5 and I think that it is deserving of low scores.
1 Like Excuse me, but I also meant to add: Since when was a 6.5 considered "bad," isn't that kind of the middle ground of a 1 - 10 scale?
2 Like I think your score is really low....... Yes it's bugged... look at the size of the game. A game of this size isn't going to be perfect from day one, add since all the updates and patches it's a massive improvement. The consoles just can't compete with a pc's frame rate. My console is £100 quid a good pc is what £600 to play games. I don't know of another game that has had the support from a software house as this as regards to patches.... I' think theres been two within a few weeks of release.. soooo re do your review mate.....
2 Like It's a disappointing review for me. I enjoy the game a lot on the xbox. It tries to do something new and inevitably has some bugs because of that. There's a big difference between the player reviews and the gamespot review too.
1 Like I really enjoyed the show, the game is actually pretty fun as well! Bugs are annoying but what game this day doesn't have bugs, let's be honest!
4 Like the score only low becoz of bugs....... now i wonder how all bethesda games getting 9.0 >:(
3 Like Kind of a crappy review... All my time with the game, and the fun i've had with it, minus all the So-called bugs, and its an easy 9...
