Defiance 2050 Review

"Large Scale Shooter"

Multiplayer

Defiance 2050 is the return of a MMORPG that's been revamped and slightly touched up for modern platforms. It's an open world third person shooter that has players working alone or together through a narrative focused experience. This is an interesting element as there was a tie-in show at one point though that was cancelled after a few seasons. The game lives on regardless and has actually had a long lifespan. Story wise it even builds around and where that show left off. Now, there's not a whole lot that's been upgraded for this new entry, it's largely just a ported experience. It runs better than it used to, though don't expect anything too wild in terms of visual upgrades.

It looks fine, but honestly I had expected more from the game in that department. Missions are fairly typical as you work across a large landscape completing primary goals or taking part in side missions. There's a lot to do story wise with great side activities for large or smaller groups of players. This includes dynamic large scale events take place occasionally and cooperative missions that can be matchmade for. There are also PVP options to battle others, but it was rare to get a squad together whenever I went to play them. The story and setting is based around a terraforming event that has left the San Francisco area in an alien-like mess. There are goals to fix it and varying factions that deal with each other here.

Gameplay

The shooter elements are fairly typical in Defiance 2050 with a number of slightly different classes to play as. I didn't find the class choice to have much of a factor aside from the special skills you gain. There's a decent skill tree to work through and many weapons to collect as you battle through hordes of creatures. I found the enemies to be fairly varied, especially as you moved along the world though somewhat spongy at times too. This was present in small doses which made single missions slightly harder, especially when other players weren't present in the area.

There's a lot to do here and many ways to do it. With this being slightly futuristic some of the tech is fancy and so is the method of transportation. You're able to easily summon a vehicle to ride and that was fun making it easy to get places. The performance was fine and the servers didn't really have any issues that I came across, keep in mind I was playing on Xbox One X. I was disappointed by the visuals finding them purely satisfactory, it would have been nice to see things touched up more.

The Conclusion

Defiance 2050 is an alright MMORPG shooter that does something new while still feeling perhaps too familiar. It's nice to see the game return once again, but more time should have been spent cleaning it up. While it was one of the later last generation games it still didn't just look better by increasing the resolution for new platforms. I still had a grand time running around blasting bugs or taking out machine enemies, but also felt this was easy going at times.

It was just a run across the country blasting enemies and progressing. I luckily had double XP for most of my time, but will warn that missions might require a certain level threshold which may result in you having to play side missions which I'm not a fan of. There's nothing wrong with them, I just like playing through narrative based missions as opposed to side activities. Aside from the story there are cooperative options, competitive ones and just a lot to do. The dynamic events are particularly exciting, especially when large pools of players group to battle together.

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Defiance 2050 Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by 47

Rating Overall: 6.7