XDefiant review – Overwatch meets Call of Duty in an Ubisoft theme park

Ubisoft; PC, PS5, Xbox
You may feel a touch of deja vu as you mow down rivals with your M16 - but although it's unoriginal, this free six-person shooter is slick and enjoyable

It is not difficult to sum up XDefiant, Ubisoft's new free-to-play arena-based shooter. It's Overwatch crossed with Call of Duty. Or maybe Apex Legends crossed with Counter-Strike. Whichever comparison you go for, what it definitely isn't is a wildly original video game. But that's not a problem if it works. And actually, it does.

XDefiant pitches teams of six players against each other in a variety of extremely familiar game types, such as Occupy, where players seek to seize a sequence of lone control points, and Domination, where they attempt to seize three control points at once. As in Activision's long-running hit Overwatch, the visuals are bright and sunny, almost cartoon-like, and the locations are compact, like discrete areas in some sort of homicidal theme park. When you're playing the Escort mode, where one team has to nudge a robotic vehicle through the map, it's so similar to the Escort mode in Overwatch you'll be continually struck with deja vu as you play. On top of that, the different classes of selectable characters (or factions as they're called here) are so distinct and specifically powered, they're much more like the individual heroes of Overwatch than the interchangeable spec-ops hard nuts of the latest Call of Duty titles.