Defiance. Yes it is...pretty defiant.

Having been interested in this game for a while, but hesistant to drop €60 on it, I've taken advantage of the free-weekend on Steam for Defiance. A cynic would say that even for free those are a lopt of hours of 'fun' you won't never get back. Basically because Defiance doesn't give anything in return for €60. (€100 with Season's Pass.)

This is the only screenshot I took... after this is just becomes too drab to have any screenshot that would stand out from another one... (Those of you who've played other MMO's with me will recognize the name, lol)

I was really looking forward to something awesome because the download is 10G! That must be something, given that 16G comprises all of Skyrim to date. I've not seen anything that warrants a filesize this huge. It's just another brownscale game, which makes it extremely hard to separate enemies from players and on top of that, to separate enemies and players from the background and I'm playing on a huge fucking monitor. I mean, that thing is in my face. I've wasted entire clips of ammo on a friendly in co-op. *sigh*

Why do developers think that after an apocalypse, all color flees the world? Especially the brighter colors suddenly seem to think that there's no place for them in post-apocalyptica anymore. However, giving the arkhunters some choice between brightly colored accents in their outfits would help a lot.

Installation was relatively painfree, though it has a high timmie-treshold. The threads on Steam about people who couldn't even figure out where to redeem the weekend-pass are too nummerous to shake a dead cat at, lol.

The tutorial was a mess. Why didn't Trion instance that? I missed vital information because I was hindered by the unavoidable bunnyhoppers and mutants going after my bacon while I tried to listen to the Ego explaining, well, something I guess... The result was that I struggled through sequence after sequence without really understanding what I was supposed to do, or even how to do it. That resulted in me fighting with the controls when I finally got in the game proper.

The Ego AI... Did anyone else go Archangel! here? I did. I'm just waiting till she gives me the 'Idunno' line, lol.

After an hour of said struggle I finally found out that I can opt to use the Xbox-UI. That made my life a lot easier. Controller works flawlessly, keyboard&mouse is so not recommended.

The gameplay, even though it gets a lot better with a 360-pad, is... ho-hum? Lackluster? A bit not all what it could be? Nah, I'm going to be honest. It just plain motherfucking sucks dick.

• 01. No one groups.
• 02. Mission goals are ninjad.
• 03. Bosses are ninjad.
• 04. Story doesn't pique interest.
• 05. Weapons aren't interesting.
• 06. Enemies are repetitive.
• 07. Bosses are bulletsponges, but have no real strategy to them.
• 08. To avoid your target from being ninjad, you start to rush your objectives.
• 09. Enemies are hard to spot because they blend in with the rest of the drabness.
• 10. I never became vested in my toon. I don't care about this Hakima.
• 11. You can't tap your targets. They don't become *yours* if you get the first shot in.
• 12. No player-city. You're constantly knee-deep in the shit.
• 13. Eventually I found myself ninjaing mission-goals because that's what everybody else was doing.
• 14. No one chats, there's no community sense.
• 15. The struggle with the UI never lets off.
• 16. Filesize promises something awesome, but I haven't seen anything that doesn't fit in a normal 4-5G file.

17. The music. OMG the music. I turned it off.

For a game this expensive, with a filesize this large, I expected my sox to be rocked. I expected player-investment from the start, I expected a community because with a pricepoint this high you'd expect that people would want to have the best experience possible. Defiance misses the mark everywhere reliably. It has a none-existant community that rather ninjas than co-op on the co-op server. The game itself suffers from bad execution. I've given it my all, but even for free I have no motivation to pick this up again.

I rather play Brawlbusters. A f2p-mmo with an instanced tutorial and true co-op that's easy to get into, over the top and fun gameplay, a rocking hard sountrack and timed action that doesn't last too long or is too short. Granted, Brawlbusters doesn't invite for hours and hours of play, but I never said I wanted that. But with a filesize of less than 1G, it offers more than Defiance ever will.

Sad.