XDefiant

The pitch was Call of Duty without skill-based matchmaking, and for about six hours that is exactly what you get: fast, readable, no sliding, no specialists, hit registration that mostly works. Then you notice there is nothing underneath it.

Nothing wrong, nothing there

Every individual system here is fine. Gunplay is responsive. Maps are legible three-lane designs. The faction abilities borrowed from other Ubisoft games are mostly harmless and occasionally interesting — the Cleaners' incendiary rounds change how you hold an angle, which is a real thought.

The problem is that after twenty hours I could not tell you a single thing that happened. No match produced a story. No map produced a memory. It is a shooter assembled from a list of competitor features with the identity removed, and identity turns out to be the part that makes people come back on a Tuesday.

Matches played

~180

Memorable ones

Zero

Hours before uninstalling

22

The netcode was the fatal part

Hit registration issues dogged this from launch and were never fully resolved. In a shooter whose entire selling point is that it is honest and fast, dying behind cover repeatedly is not a bug on a list — it invalidates the pitch. Ubisoft patched steadily and the situation improved, but the audience that came for a clean arcade shooter had already tested it and left.

Where it slips

Progression is slow in the way free games are slow, unlocks are cosmetic and uninspiring, and the map rotation was thin at launch and grew slowly. There is also no reason to prefer this over the games it borrows from, which is the question a new shooter has to answer in its first week.

The verdict

Not bad. Not anything. Twenty-two hours here taught me less about shooters than two hours of Helldivers 2 did, and I would not have finished this review had it not been for the argument the failure makes: competence is not a product.

Ubisoft shut it down in 2025. That is a sad ending for a team who built something that worked, and it was the correct decision.