Defiance Review: Lost in Translation TLDR: Interesting mechanics and story hindered by completely imbalanced pvp, lackluster leveling systems, pointless gear upgrades and an overall absence of design intelligence. Score: 6/10 What’s the definition of squandered potential? Like a masterful musician managing a Burger King in a small town. OK, maybe not that dramatic, but this is what Defiance is: a great, albeit unoriginal, idea that doesn’t live up to what it was meant to be. For few things that Defiance gets right, there’s one or more things there that counter it and poops on your gameplay. So, what is Defiance? It could easily be summed up as a third person shooter MMO that mimics Borderlands in almost every way, except: It lacks any kind of personality or style and is void of any design intelligence. The main character, an “Ark Hunter” that has a choice of 4 abilities at character creation (Cloak, Decoy, Overchage and Blur), basically boils you down to a henchman for hire. With every stereotypical Syfy character lining up to buy your services, which mostly involves holding the “E” button for a few seconds to complete an objective and killing a few waves of random bad guys. The Ark Hunter that you play is mostly a silent protagonist, aside from the one off shouts of “OMG I’m hurt” while taking too much damage. This, tied with the underwhelming NPCs and bore of a story, left me really not caring at all about what happens to my character or the what happening in the game. The show tie-ins are the only quest lines that interested me, but after watching the show’s first episode, that appeal quickly vanished as the show was a huge bucket of meh. The quest/mission structure, as I shed light on earlier, is as non-pulse as it can come. “Run to this location and hold “E”, but watch out, there’s bad guys around!” pretty much sums up the entirety of the PVE content of the game. Except for the Ark Fall encounters, which after you’ve seen the 4 or 5 different varieties loses it’s luster, even though it’s a welcome break. These mostly include a central object or enemy that requires the player to damage to a point, kill enemies that spawn, then back to the boss/object. It’s the same mechanic repeated and reskinned in most cases. The only driving factor that comes from the game is it’s loot and perk treadmill. The carrot on a stick loot grind is great at low levels until you realize that gear upgrades don’t upgrade your character the way you’re used to. Once the realization hits, you just don’t care about other weapons and equipment. You pick up the weapons you’re comfortable with, mod them accordingly and all of a sudden, loot means nothing. For example: two weapons may be the same type, but one may be “epic” and be of a different sort of damage type and have a mod slot or two, which allows you to extend clip size or add a scope, etc. Where the other may just have a slight damage modifier. Two different people with these guns will do roughly the same amount of damage, but not enough to really show a moderate difference and the former spent a lot of time, effort and resources for a minimal payoff. Which brings me to another point: PVP is broken. There are standard team deathmatch maps available pretty soon in the game, but matchmaking and weapon balancing is all over the place. A player with cloak and a shotgun is more powerful than any other combination in my opinion. Which in turn leads players to spec this way just to be overpowered/competitive. The multiplayer maps themselves are serviceable but nothing really stands out. Defiance is the first “AAA” title to explore this MMO sub-genre, so I suppose I can’t be too harsh on the game. It just oozes mediocrity and begs to be moved to the Free-to-Play tab. There’s more to discuss about the game, but I believe too much time has been spent on it already. I can’t honestly recommend anyone shelling out $60 bucks for this game. If it were F2P, I think it might be worth tooling around with and maybe with future patches they can fix graphics and sound issues, introduce more meaningful content. I want this kind of game to be successful, I really do. Defiance had it’s shot. Destiny and Firefall, you’re next. Darf
