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Defiance Review for Xbox 360

Defiance Review for Xbox 360

Defying The Norm

Last week, Defiance came out. Its launch was less-than-spectacular ( something I wrote a bit about ), but that’s to be expected of pretty much any MMO. And yes, even though it’s a third-person shooter, Defiance is also an MMO.

So after the game’s first week, how is it looking?

Well, server issues are still fairly common (my experience with the game is entirely on Xbox 360). And this creates a ton of problems. Most notably is that when the servers start lagging, your X button stops working. And this just flat out sucks, because X is your action button. Are you in the middle of a quest where you need to disable generators in between waves of raider swarms? You’ll have to push X before the next wave spawns in. Good luck with that, kid. The X button also dismounts you from whichever vehicle you are driving. There was one time where I literally had to reset my game in order to get my character off of his ATV.

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Aside from the X-button weirdness, everything just works slowly. Your menus take too long to load in, you’ll see other players jittering around the map, and enemies react far too slowly to being killed, often taking two or three seconds to actually die once you’ve killed them. And this makes for an incredibly frustrating experience.

But sometimes the game works perfectly. Sometimes the lag completely disappears. Sometimes, the action button works exactly as intended. And these moments are absolutely fantastic. (It must also be noted that Trion has been very communicative with fans, giving us updates on the status of servers and patches and bugs and things on an almost daily basis, which does lessen the sting of the server issues a bit.)

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Defiance is set in a post-apocalyptic San Fransisco, where alien terraforming has begun to wreak all sorts of havoc across the landscape. You step into the shoes of an Ark Hunter that you create (though the character creation system here is depressingly shallow), working for a stuck up Billy Corgan lookalike named Karl von Bach. Von Bach has a fancy little trinket called an ark core that he claims he’s going to use to save the world, and, of course, it ends up in the wrong hands. As an Ark Hunter, it’s up to you to track it down once again.

So what exactly is an Ark Hunter? Well, they collect alien artifacts and things and sell them to the highest bidder, and sometimes take on other missions with varying degrees of legality. Let’s just say that Ark Hunters are basically a badass combination of Indiana Jones and Boba Fett.

Now, I mentioned in my first impressions article that Defiance’s first couple hours are pretty rough. They’re cutscene-and-tutorial-heavy, and the story seems largely uninteresting at first. But having played much deeper into the game, I have to say that everything about Defiance gets better as you continue to invest time into it. The missions get more interesting, the characters become less annoying, the enemies become more varied and more difficult to kill, you unlock cool additional features like Contract Missions, and even the landscape gets more and more impressive as you venture forth.

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To me, this is a sign of a well-made MMO. The game is designed to be played for hundreds of hours, not just five or ten, so I can completely forgive it for the slow opening section. It’s the later stuff that matters. Players need to feel rewarded for sticking around, and Defiance is a game that knows how to remain interesting in its later portions.

But that’s not to say it won’t feel like a grind at times. You’ve still got your typical fetch and escort quests, and a lot of the Contracts end up feeling like kill quests (though they don’t require interaction with an NPC to pick up or turn in, which is nice.) A weird little thing that might seem counterintuitive for MMO veterans is that you can only have one active quest at a time (Contracts don’t count as quests; you can have several active at once). While that keeps your minimap less cluttered, it also means you’re going to wind up returning to the same areas over and over again and saying, “Damn, that would have saved me quite a bit of time had I just done both these quests at once.”

Defiance also contains PvP, which is separated into two different modes. The first is just your standard Team Deathmatch (8v8 here), which is all well and good, but the real meat of PvP here is Shadow Wars. These 25-on-25 battle zones have you capturing and holding checkpoints in what is essentially Call of Duty’s Domination mode. But here you can use vehicles, a fact that becomes essential when traversing the fairly large distance between capture points. It also allows you to run over your opponents, which is absolutely glorious. And then, of course, are the environmental hazards, which throw your standard PvE enemies into clusters around some of the capture points. These matches tend to devolve into only the best sort of chaos, and being involved in that flat-out anarchy is an absolute blast.

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Of course, one of the game’s selling points is that it’s tied into a Syfy series of the same name. Now, I can’t really comment a whole lot on the links between the game and the TV series, since the show hasn’t even started yet. However, I have seen enough of the show’s promotional material to know that both Joshua Nolan and Irisa, two characters you’ll run into time and time again throughout the game, are prominently featured in the television series.

Additionally, there are “Episode Missions,” which are connected with the television series somehow. I’m led to understand that when a new episode is aired, new Episode Missions become available, and that the content is somehow linked. But, as I mentioned already, the show hasn’t begun and I haven’t been able to experience the link firsthand.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not completely sold on the transmedia concept. Defiance stands on its own as an MMO; adding a television series into the mix ruins the risk of tainting the game in the eyes of a lot of people. And what if the show is completely terrible and gets cancelled almost immediately? Does the MMO trudge on without it, or does the captain go down with the ship, so to speak?

As an MMO, though, Defiance does alright for itself. It gives players a massive world to explore and do quests in, as well as co-op missions and Deathmatch/Domination PvP modes. It’s jam-packed with content, and it gets more interesting once you’ve invested several hours into it.

I just wish those servers would be more reliable.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 3.7 Graphics
Some of the landscapes are gorgeous, with alien flora taking over the familiar California landscape. Still, it’s certainly not the prettiest thing we’ve seen this generation. 3.8 Control
Combat controls are intuitive, though the menus can be confusing. Of course, when the servers start to lag, the controls are the first thing to get wonky. 3.7 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Some of the voice acting sounds like it’s from a cartoon, which feels weird in this bleak, post-apocalyptic world. Other voices sound fine. Sound effects and score are your standard faire here, which is slightly disappointing considering this involves lots of alien tech. This could have given the audio team a ton of room to be creative with the sound effects. 4.5 Play Value
There’s simply a ton of content here. Some of it will feel repetitive, but it certainly gets better as you get deeper into the game. Of course, the server issues can make it a frustrating experience. We’re crossing our fingers and hoping those will be taken care of soon. 3.8 Overall Rating – Good
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • An Adventure for the Masses – Lead the charge in huge co-op battles and fierce multiplayer conflicts across an immersive world.
  • A Massive, Persistent World – Fully realized, persistent open world set in a futuristic San Francisco Bay Area, supporting tens of thousands of simultaneous live players. Fight for survival in a constantly evolving environment with regular content updates and dynamic events.
  • Customize Your Character – Custom character creation, where you can play as a human or alien, modify your appearance, upgrade weapons, select different specializations, and choose your own progression within Defiance universe.
  • Call to Arms – Level up and modify a wide variety of modern and alien tech weaponry.
  • Transportation Evolved – Traverse terrain using a range of vehicles to explore the vast landscape transformed by alien technology.
  • Change the Future – Impact television with your heroic adventures, and be impacted by events in the Defiance TV series.

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