Gaming Nexus Plays: XDefiant

Written by Eric Hauter on 4/20/2023 for PC   PS4   PS5   STA   XONE   XSX  

This past Sunday afternoon, Gaming Nexus editors Joseph Moorer, Jason Dailey, and Elliot Hilderbrand, and Eric Hauter jumped into Joseph's Games N Moorer streaming channels to try out the closed beta of Ubisoft's new free-to-play shooter XDefiant. Not going to lie, the first few matches were pretty ugly. Only Jason was truly prepared to walk into the buzzsaw of competitive online FPS games, and the rest of us we left bewildered for a little while, wondering why we could only move three steps from the spawn point before getting gunned down.

But you play more and you adapt. Eventually, we gathered our wits and started putting up a halfway decent fight, finding our preferred factions and even winning a few matches in our 90-minute play session. In the end, we were left with the impression that while we weren't ready for XDefiant, we were ready to step up and try harder, because this game is fun as hell.

XDefiant (formerly known as "Tom Clancy's XDefiant") combines factions from Ubisoft's vast library of franchises, including The Cleaners (The Division), Libertad (Far Cry 6), Echelon (Splinter Cell), and Phantoms (Ghost Recon Phantoms) - with a fifth unlockable faction (Dedsec from Watch Dogs). Players choose a faction to take into battle, each with its own special powers, weapons, and abilities, and hop into one of the game's fourteen maps for some good ol' fashioned 6v6 team-based shooting.

We tried out most of the five modes that were available in the beta, most of which will be recognizable to shooter fans. There was the obligatory escort mission ("Push the package!"), the mode where you have to capture three points and try to hold them (probably my favorite), a mode where both teams battle it out over a single, ever-shifting point, a five-zone Zone Control mode (with each of the five zones unlocking in succession) and a free-for-all. One quick look at the above video and you can quickly see that the action is lightning fast, and players can either step it up or be savaged.

There's a ton of content in the game already, and Ubisoft has committed to the full court press going forward, with promises to add more of everything to XDefiant: more maps, more modes, more characters, more factions, more weapons, etc. The Gaming Nexus gang all agree that we would like to see some Rabbids eventually make their way to the game. 

While there isn't a confirmed release date for XDefiant (no matter how many times we say in the video that it's coming in July - we pulled that date out of our collective asses), you can probably expect the game to arrive on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC sometime in 2023. In the meantime, the closed beta is still running through April 23.