ZAM's initial verdict on the ambitious multimedia crossover MMO

There are also distractions like timed races and so on which are fun to begin with but the very arcade-y handling of the vehicles (you simply cannot flip your bike, for example) removes much of the tension in negotiating each course and made those events quickly repetitive for me. There are those who enjoy these events to a larger degree, including my esteemed colleague Mike B, whose review you can find in the latest BFF Report.

I found myself having the most fun with Arkfall events. Similar to rifts in, well, Rift, Arkfalls can gather large crowds of Ark Hunters to battle against massive creatures. Those moments of coming together with other players, while watching the air light up with firepower, can be quite enthralling. You can go from event to event following the large red icons on the map and rack up some impressive loot.

Having successfully completed one such Arkfall, I picked up a nice new assault rifle that had the useful side-effect of setting my foes on fire (except for more resistant Elites). This increased my enjoyment of basic combat considerably.

The starting weapons don’t help the game at all as there is a distinct lack of visceral impact from initial combat. Although upgrading your weapon does make the gunplay feel more immediate; it still isn’t as exciting or involving as you would experience in a classic shooter, such as Battlefield 3. But this is an MMO you might say. True, but PlanetSide 2 does a better job of making you feel powerful while lending more impact to each battle.

Making this experience more engaging can certainly be fixed with better sound effects, visual cues and animations; but when you have put down the latest identical, dim-witted humanoid again the lure of just getting into a fight diminishes quickly. Which is problematic as that is the main objective of most of the side quests.

There is a huge variety of weaponry and players who got a big kick out of the veritable Matrix-style armory of Borderlands 2 will enjoy trying out all of the different options available until they find the guns that scratch their itch.

The other main aspect of combat, the EGO system, offers some flair and variety with the different powers you can use. For example, Decoy is a lot of fun, particularly when you can pull it off in PvP situations, though I prefer the Cloak power simply due to how consistently useful it is in completing missions. Setting up the perks that you earn in combination with your EGO power allows you to tailor your character to your preferred game play style. The EGO system UI doesn’t point out to you that you actually need to equip those perks so I almost accidentally realized that by poking around with my character page and noticing there was a slot with nothing in it.

In fact, the game’s most glaring annoyance stems from the user interface. Obviously designed with the console in mind, on the PC it lacks intuitiveness at every non-responsive turn. Just logging off is initially confusing and the other aspects of the UI consistently suffer from presenting information opaquely or just not at all.

For example, after taking down my latest pack of similarly garbed mutants (there will be plenty of that for players), a mod dropped that upgraded my magazine for bolt action or auto sniper rifles. Being a devotee of sniping in shooters, I attempted to upgrade my rifle with the mod.

After finding my way to the relevant Salvage Matrix page of the UI (there’s not a direct hotkey) I placed the rifle in the slot to be modified. It sat unmoved and uninterested in my eager attempts to reduce the amount of time I spent reloading. No options were apparently available.

I tried putting the mod into the slot instead; perhaps I needed to do it that way first?

No, no options for that either.

Upon re-reading the mod description, it indicated it could be used with any type of sniper rifle; my sniper rifle was of any type. Did I click something incorrectly?

I repeated the process and got nowhere. The issue, apparently, is you can’t modify items until gaining EGO level 100. I found this out from searching the Internet as it didn’t say anything about that in the UI used for modding or on the items; which one would think would be the obvious way to go about things.

There is still a lot that I have to explore in Defiance, hence this being a first impressions review rather than a final judgment; yet so far scratching beneath the surface has found more surface. There are lots of different things to do, but none of them have the depth to keep the attention for great length on their own terms.

At times the game can be quite enjoyable and will pass the time effectively, but nothing so far grips me and makes me want to log back in again with regularity.

I sense that it isn’t the ambition of Defiance’s systems that has caused issues, more that trying to launch a game to the set deadline of the premiere of the television show has left a lot of systems unfinished, with plenty of bugs still in need of ironing out (things that Trion is absolutely working tirelessly to correct).

Gareth "Gazimoff" Harmer made an allusion to Icarus in our pre-release preview, but at launch it seems Defiance is not a case of Icarus flying too close to the sun, more that he didn’t leave the wax to set before taking his leap of faith.

Hopefully, Trion can diminish the frustration by smoothing out the experience and adding more depth to the gameplay with time.

Scott "Jarimor" Hawkes, Editor in Chief