Ubisoft's XDefiant is a surprisingly solid shooter, but so messy it's hard to get into

I got some hands-on time with XDefiant, Ubisoft's franchise-blending free-to-play shooter, ahead of its upcoming beta, and I'm of two minds about it. I was honestly quite impressed with its gunplay. It's shaping up to be a sharp FPS with a nice variety of guns that feel good to use and customize, though my preview only gave me time to dabble in the lowest-level weapon attachments. But I find myself with neutral or negative feelings about almost everything else, which makes me wonder if anything about it is good enough to pull players away from the likes of Counter-Strike or Overwatch 2, especially when XDefiant seems to be standing on the shoulders of those giants.

The pitch for XDefiant has been kind of muddy. It's a 6v6 arcade shooter, Ubisoft told me at a recent event. It's got arena modes like zone control as well as linear objective modes like pushing a payload. It's got the streamlined engagements, simple movement, and low time-to-kill of CS:GO – or is at least in the same neighborhood – but splashes in the cooldown-based abilities and ultimates seen in the likes of Valorant and Overwatch 2. It does genuinely feel like a fresh combination of FPS elements and modes, but I'm not yet sure that it's a good combination.

An uneven experience

My enjoyment varied wildly between maps, modes, and factions, which are basically classes. There will be five factions at launch with a new one coming in every three-month season, and each faction has one fixed ultimate plus two active abilities to choose from. So a loadout consists of whatever guns and attachments you want, the ultimate for your chosen faction, and your preferred ability, and you can change all of these mid-match. I quickly gravitated to the invisible suit of Splinter Cell's Echelon faction, and so did a lot of other people in my player pool because it turns out that becoming very hard to see is extremely powerful in a game that's mechanically adjacent to CS:GO. I also saw a lot of the Dedsec faction from Watch Dogs, particularly the spider drone that completely stops you from Playing The Video Game once it latches on like a mechanical Alien facehugger that you can barely see or hear coming.

The flamethrower-equipped Cleaners from The Division specialize in area denial. Far Cry 6's freedom fighters can overheal themselves (very strong) or put down brief healing fields for allies (much less strong). Ghost Recon's Phantoms are the tanks of the bunch and can deploy shields to hide behind. Most of these factions will feel familiar, not just to fans of Ubisoft's franchises but also to regular purveyors of today's competitive-minded shooters. And it is interesting to see these abilities revisited within an arena FPS sandbox with a TTK this low, but it feels like they often get in the way of gunplay rather than elevating it.

For starters, you die so quickly that it's almost impossible to use most abilities reactively, which clashes with the message I got from my brief chat with some XDefiant devs. What good is a heal when it doesn't meaningfully change how many bullets it takes to kill you or your teammates? If a good player gets the first shot on you, you will never have time to pop your overheal, or invis-suit, or whatever before you die, and you're better off shooting back anyway. You freakin' drop in this game. Basically all weapons kill in fractions of a second, especially if you're hitting headshots. XDefiant has the fast, kill-die-respawn, meat-grinder pacing of something like Call of Duty. That's not inherently a bad thing, but this low TTK seems to conflict with the abilities that XDefiant is largely built around (and is perhaps not a perfect fit for payload gameplay either).

For this reason, I'd say I had the most fun with the Hot Shot mode, which is basically Kill Confirmed where the leading player gets a movement speed buff while also being marked and extra visible for enemies. It felt like Hot Shot did the best job of embracing and leveraging fast, chaotic engagements while giving players a compelling reason to coordinate their movements. XDefiant felt more like an arena shooter in these moments, which was nice.

And an imperfect combination

So OK, I thought to myself after a few matches, I guess abilities are meant to be largely proactive. But even then, some of them just feel like a free kill – or, at the very least, a heavily favored engagement – given out every 30 seconds or so with extremely low skill requirements. And if they didn't feel kind of cheap, abilities just felt wimpy. That includes several ultimates that you only get to use once or twice a match, and which couldn't be further from the play-maker ults of Overwatch 2. Likewise, they're simultaneously less interesting and more annoying than abilities in the likes of Valorant. And while I'm complaining, let me quickly add that XDefiant has some of the worst grenades I've ever used. I'd be better off throwing a baseball hoping to concuss enemy players.

The abilities are just kind of here, and I don't entirely know why. The gunplay of XDefiant is telling me to peek carefully, control weapon spray, maintain map awareness, strafe effectively, lead shots based on consistent movement speed and hitbox size, and play in my weapon's effective range. And it's pretty good at that! Skill expression is further layered in through wrinkles like the slide, slide jump, and reload cancels. But almost every time I tried to focus on the FPS principles that make up the bones of the genre XDefiant wants to occupy, I'd get shut down by what felt like some extraneous bullshit.

I don't think the map design is helping either. Here again, my experience varied a lot. Some maps felt nicely sized and tightly focused, while others felt way too big for 6v6. I mean absurdly oversized, and with a ridiculous number of paths, bits of cover, and vantage points for a game that claims to focus on the three-lane fundamentals of arena shooters. Obviously, I didn't have much time to learn the maps, and maybe pre-beta lag or wonky spawning made things worse, but it felt truly impossible to predict enemy movements and approaches on several maps. It's like trying to staple rain to a tree. I also played payload on a more linear map that seemed to greatly favor the defending team in its checkpoint placement and overall pathing, and I say that after experiencing it as an attacker and defender.

I didn't hate the few hours I spent with XDefiant, and I sincerely think the raw gunplay here is worth trying, especially since the game will be totally free. But it feels like a classic case of a bloated game; there's a whole bunch of stuff covering what might be a nice, clean experience. To me, it didn't feel like an engaging enough ability shooter – for lack of a better word for the post-Overwatch roster – or a rewarding enough arena shooter, and those are hard genres to break into even when you are unquestionably the new hotness.