Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Defiance: The Game 9/10


So i haven't done a review in a while.....  Mainly because I've been playing the game i wanted to review so much.  Its Defiance, the new Trion MMO that is on Pc, Xbox 360, and the PS3.  Its the first of its kind, an MMO that is across all platforms. And if you read that sentence and thought, "Hey Mike, you forgot about the Wii console."  I didnt forget, i just don't count it as a playable system.  But back to Defiance.  It is a SyFy third-person shooter as an MMO.  On day one, the servers were absolutely terrible because Trion didn't anyone would buy this game.  If i were making a game with online servers, i would make sure that on day one, there would be enough room on the server for every copy of the game that was created and if you didnt need every server, then clos some down.  But after a day or two, Trion more than doubled their server, fixing most of the server issues.

So in the game, you hear of the back story of a huge war that happened and that most of everything was destroyed and you are one of the survivors.  You get the choice between four different classes, being the Outlaw, Machinist, Suvivalist, and the Veteran.  The only differences I have seen in the different classes are the starting weapons.I have yet to see and story missions varying from class to class.  The other thing that you can change to make your character different is his/ her race.  You have to choice between a human or and alien race.  Nothing except changing what your character looks like.  There are also new character races coming out with the season pass to the game.  And like every other MMO out there, you can change your characters features.  Do you want black hair, blue eyes, etc.  There are four skills that you can pick, consisting of Blur (faster movement and increased melee damage),  Overcharge (increasing the amount of damage your guns for a short period of time),  Decoy (created a copy of yourself to distract enemies and can be used to teleport to decoy's position), and my favorite, Cloaking (self explanatory). Along with the Main Skills, there are many perks that you can use to build your character to accustom your play style.

As you start out, like every other game in existence, you have a tutorial.  It teaches you how to move, look around, and to shoot, all the basics.  Then you have your first series of "Quests" like using the mini map to find lost salvage and grenades.  Then once that is completed, you are taken to Defiance and meet all of your fellow Ark Hunters.  When you're at the Republic camp, you can see a lot of other players, but it is incredible seeing how many people there are at an Ark Fall at 11 pm eastern on any given day.  This game has its own experience when you have a massive group of people all attacking the same objective.

Just like every open world game, you have your main missions, side mission, and some other time killing races or horde mode.  But the thing that makes this such a great game is that you dont have a limit of how many people can help you.  as you do some of the missions, you have other players doing the same mission, making it easier for everyone, as there are a lot of enemies in most missions.  The only missions that you have to do by yourself are the Episode missions.  Those missions are based off of the next airing episode of Defiance.  Yes Defiance is a tv show too!!!!!  I watched the first episode two days ago and it was great.  It tied into the game and explained everything i had questions about from the game.  It explained who Nolan was and how the world came to be.

Overall, this game impressed me.  I thought an MMO on the Xbox would be a terrible idea and had doubts until i started playing it.  Yes, the servers weren't the best on day one, but they are much better and I have no trouble logging into the game now.  I even was able to recruit one of my friends, Snarf to play, which ended up making my friend Cees buy the game because he was by himself most nights playing Gears of War or Halo, while the rest of us were playing Defiance.

For Defiance, I have to give it an 9 / 10 just for how good the game has been so far and the ability to do almost any mission co-op and the extent of the skill trees and constantly finding better  loot and mods.