Defiance: A First Look

A New MMO from Trion

I recently started playing Defiance, having been gifted it by a friend. It was described to me as, “Like borderlands, but more realistic and without all the memes.” Well, that caught my attention and I downloaded it. Started out making an Outlaw, got a shotgun and started killing mutants.

So is this a review?

Kind of. I haven’t been able to put as much time into the game as I’d like. The story of the game is pretty neat. Aliens have kind of made a mass exodus to Earth, bunch of stuff went down, tons of destruction everywhere. The game itself is a tie-in with the show Defiance, on the SyFy channel. Character customization is a bit limited, but that’s because apparently your character can make an appearance on the show. That is a really cool idea.

The skill system is really neat too. Basically, there are four active skills, one of which you pick almost right away. As you complete quests and kill enemies, you get to unlock crazy passive skills. Some of the ones I’ve seen so far are along the lines of refreshing your active skills by fully reloading a weapon, gaining damage reduction while your shield is recharging, and all kinds of other stuff.

Crazy amount of skills/perks to get for your character, no doubt.

Gameplay

The gunplay in the game is pretty cool, although guns themselves can occasionally feel a little meh. My starting shotgun, for example, felt more like a pop gun than anything else. Otherwise everything else feels like it packs a real punch. And there’s a lot of variety in weapons. Assault rifles, shotguns, LMGs, pistols, snipers, the works.

I’ve seen some videos of the dungeons, although I haven’t done one yet. They look good, requiring teamwork and active use of skills. Like using someone with cloak to get behind the enemy to take out snipers, someone sending out decoys to keep large groups of enemies distracted, etc etc.

All in all I feel Defiance is worth checking out. I’m playing with a friend (who named himself SterlingArcher, I hate my friends some days) and we’ve been content to run around, shoot stuff, and crash our ATVs into each other. I’ll have a more solid review up sometime by the end of the week, once I can delve a bit deeper into the dungeon system and whatnot.