Bitchin’ Fridays: Defiance the Game review

            This week I thought I would do a game review on a gamed that I had been playing for the past month.  The game was Defiance, and never in my life have I been so frustrated at am MMO style game.  Not for the excessively repetitive quests but for the updating and the constant getting screwed over by the game it’s self.

            Defiance is a tie into the Syfy of the same name developed by Trion Worlds.  Set in a devastated San Francisco Bay area after a war between humans and alien alliance of extraterrestrial races; your character is an Ark Hunter (basically a mercenary for hire) assisting Karl Von Bach in search of advanced and valuable arktech.  You start off by crash landing in the Bay area away from your boss and from there the typical walk threw on how to play starts.

            At first I like playing this game (played it on the 360) it is open world and you can interact with vast amount of players to complete quests with out the fear of someone trying to kill you.  I could play with friend in a relaxing environment and do what ever we want.  It was nice to have this MMO experience brought to the counsels but that quickly demolished as I continued to play.  

            My first big gripe is when I first installed the game.  It took for ever to install which is fine but to then open the game to only find over an hours worth of patching updates that needed to be installed before I can play sucks.  I understand why they have so many patches (the game is buggy as hell) but to come off the bat saying that your game is so problematic at launch that it needed over and hour’s worth of patching screams that you needed more time to work on this game.

            Second gripe is the servers. 

You get this

Or this

Or even this:

It is beyond frustrating to go login and try to play a game to only be denied.   To put it simply,

            Ok so eventually I am able to log in and play.  After the first initial tutorial level that only teaches you how to fight and pick your perks you are thrown into the world with out any more help.  Trust me you need an extra tutorial on how to modify weapons, how to use the rest of your menu screen, and other world interactions like what is a lock box or key codes and why do I need to buy these things.  The game did not come with an instruction manual so I had research online on how to do everything in the game and even how to log out.  Oh and by the way to log out is a separate screen that can only be accessed by opening up the main menu and holding down the left trigger button to access it.

            Once you have figured out how to play it is fun, for a while.  Eventually the game play gets repetitive (like many other MMO’s) and even the Ark fall events get boring and repetitive.  What really irks me is when I’m playing with friends and they are a few missions below me and they go do a main mission, half the time I cannot help them.  They disappear for 15 minutes at a time and I sit around doing nothing.  It take the fun out of playing with your friends. 

            The straw that broke the camels back for me was when the game fucked me over.  There are times that I would have to hit and hold the x button and the game would not register it and I would have to repeater my action multiple times before it would register.  Another thing is when I am fighting enemies and I am almost done and poof 15 random enemies would spawn up and kill me.  The last thing that I hated about this game was the inconstancies with your death and respawn.  This usually happens in a boss fight.  I would be down for the first time and cant get back up and die, but other times when I can immediately get back up and continue to fight.

            Over all this game had started off well and a good start for future of MMo’s on the consol but this game feels more like and experiment and a waste of time, money, and disk space.  I would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on this and if you have any suggestions on what I should bitch about next week leave me a comment.  See you Monday for a wrap up of my week.

See you on the other side.