Hyper Scape? Does anyone remember that game? Ubisoft‘s Battle Royale launched almost a year ago, which makes the announcement revealing Tom Clancy’s XDefiant almost make sense. This is Ubisoft trying again to make a free-to-play shooter.
XDefiant is Apex Legends meets Call of Duty. A hero shooter with Arena-like gameplay, based very vaguely on the factions found across the extended Tom Clancy universe. No, this is not a new Splinter Cell game, it’s a free FPS.
Mark Rubin, the game’s executive producer, worked with Infinity Ward developing Call of Duty titles like Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Jason Schroeder is a long-standing Ubisoft director who has worked on games like Rocksmith and a South Park title.
They stress in the trailer that they are looking to structure the game around player feedback, and much like for Hyper Scape there is a short closed beta period for feedback between player and developer.
But don’t get too excited. Hyper Scape had a short, brief, hilariously overblown period at the start of its lifespan (pretty sure Tfue was streaming it at one time with around 40,000 viewers), but the game quickly fell off. The developers made almost no changes to the game after its first season, and the game is now well and truly dead.
To make matters worse, XDefiant looks…well, unimaginative. Many of the heroes here do not look overly creative, including a plague mask character that looks unbelievably similar to Bloodhound from Apex Legends, and the map design looks to be punky in the sort of washed-out way that you might expect from a studio that chucks out games like this for fun. “Punk moshpit” and Tom Clancy are not a match made in video-game heaven.
The fact that Tom Clancy’s name is strapped to the front of it makes the whole thing a bit more painful. This new IP, which unironically features 2008’s ‘xD’ in the title, looks nothing like a Clancy game. In fact, there isn’t really much of anything Clancy in the trailers and teaser at all.
That’s a shame. Clancy has years and years of work and many fans. The earlier games did justice to his creative legacy, although it seems like Ubisoft is really going to milk the IP while they’ve got hold of it.
