ubisoft recently gave us the opportunity to try out their upcoming free-to-play online arena shooter "xdefiant", a game that had completely eluded me until I received the closed beta test notification. after the initial reveal as tom clancy's xdefiant in June 2021, which received a lukewarm response from the community and very little promotion from the developers since then. add to that the fact that several other free-to-play fps titles like apex legends, overwatch, and the recently announced counter-strike 2 are in the same space, making it a bit hard to think of a title that has nothing to show for one.
Ubisoft's XDefiant: So far, it's not sucking (in fact, it's pretty good)
However, it seems that ubisoft has been conducting insider playtests with large groups of players and tweaking the game over the past year. and finally, they're ready to share their hard work with the world in the form of a 10-day closed beta, which will be live when this hands-on experience goes live. beebom, along with a few others, were invited to check out the game with full access and no restrictions. after spending a couple of hours with the game, here are our first impressions:
When we started the game, the first thing we did was look through all the factions in xdefiant. think of these as the classes in apex legends. The soul of the game, these factions are the characters that players get to choose and play in xdefiant, with each of them specializing in certain gameplay abilities.
while some are good at healing themselves and their team, others are good at denying entry. these factions are based on previous popular titles made by ubisoft, including some that come from fan favorite titles. in addition, each faction has three characters to choose from. this is primarily a cosmetic change and does not affect the power or abilities you have access to. in our testing we were given access to five factions that the game will launch with:
