Now let’s talk about the feel of the game. How does it feel to play it? Controlling/moving, aiming and rolling feels like Mass Effect, so simply put it feels great in this part. However in the shooting one, it’s no where near the Mass Effect or Gears feel. It feels like you are firing rubber ammunition and the same is for the explosives. There are many different weapons that shoot rockets or grenades, but you don’t really get the feeling that you are using a powerful rocket. Puff! they explode and doesn’t even cause a knock back effect to the enemies. Bullets doesn’t have a satisfying impact or any impact at all, explosives just explode visually and yet the combat still manages to be fun and as strange and contradictory this may sound, it’s the truth. Mowing down hellbugs, scrappers, mutants, big balded mutants, big scary hellbugs, elite soldiers etc. somehow manages to be satisfying and fun. Traversing around the big world is done by walking, fast travelling or driving. There are different vehicles ranging from ATVs, dune buggy, a very fast Dodge Challenger, vans, but I what I would really love to see is a flying vehicle. Driving feels a little floaty, but it’s fun. Jumping off a cliff and pulling off a 7200 on the ATV… yeah, it’s awesome and fun.
Fun. The definition of fun changes for everyone. For example, for some of you who are reading this it might be fun to do the same thing over and over again with your friends and I am not against that, but for me doing the same thing over and over get really boring really fast. The missions here are an excellent example of that. If you could sum up the main and side missions in the game in one sentence it would be “Kill, kill, kill then hold X or Square (or whatever the PC button is) till you complete the objective.” This is the ugly truth behind the mission design in Defiance. It all boils down to holding a button to complete the mission and this gets boring. Making it more boring and annoying is the inconsistent AI. Sometimes they will just stand there doing nothing while you shoot them and in some other cases they will literally whup your a$$ as they don’t miss a bullet and lob perfect grenades from miles away.
To increase its lasting appeal, there are some challenges like a horde mode type where you are given a weapon (most of the times a minigun) and you have to survive waves of enemies as much as you can. There’s also a race through checkpoints time trial style and the protect “something” from “something” till time runs out challenge. Some nice challenges but I wish there more. I wish there was a multiplayer mode where I could race other players in Death Race style, cars with guns and rockets. Also I wish there were some minigames too like poker or a futuristic card game. Or something like a shooting competition, score X number of headshots or whatever all in multiplayer type of challenge or a scavenge/treasure hunt challenge where you search for weapons part and other loot. Or a bounty hunter system where we have to hunt the best player of the day/week/month and capture or kill him. The possibilites are infinite! Also I wish they tone down the boring instances, I don’t want to rescue the same farmer again and again. Another thing that I felt was missing was a loot chest type of thing. The map and the world of Defiance is big and finding a chest with an awesome weapom after killing a sh*t ton of mutants or hellbugs would feel very satisfying. Borderlands did an amazing job in this part and I think it would be a fantastic addition for Defiance in the future.
Now what is fun in Defiance or at least what is fun for me, are the cooperative missions. Four players are teleported in a separate map and have to complete the mission. These missions are, maybe, the greatest thing about Defiance cause they are done in a fantastic way and have a very interesting story to tell. And the boss fights at the end are super cool. I highly recommend to play all of these co-op missions. The competitive part of Defiance, the PVP side, yeah you can skip it and not miss a thing. It’s a cluster-f*ck of rockets, grenades and lame cloaking shotgun insta-kill players. It’s frustrating and can get on your nerves pretty quickly. There is also a Shadow War mode, think Call of Duty Domination or Battlefield Conquest, that can be fun to play when there is one going on. Waiting a full day for the lobby to fill up with 64 players for the match to start isn’t the way to go, the devs need to find another way.
