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Call of Duty‘s roots in the shooter genre have been established for more than two decades. Activision has built a franchise that has grown many innovative game modes, stories, themes, and communities that run discussions on every angle of their games. However, after the defeat of Battlefield with its sluggish 2042 launch, a new rival has arrived to match CoD. Most streamers and gamers call it the Call of Duty killer, but can Ubisoft’s XDefiant win the battle against the veteran shooter? Let’s review both games from different grades.
Movement Mechanics
If you’re a Call of Duty player who has recently jumped into the XDefiant action, you’d realize a sense of similarity. Both games offer fast-paced gameplay, which is solid for games that are not on a tactical level such as Rainbow Six Siege. However, there are differences between the Ubisoft and Activision’s Output.
First, there’s the slide-cancelling technique. While both games share the same mechanic, in XDefiant you can end your slide with a jump. This feels most like the Black Ops 4 slide-jump movement, while MW3 doesn’t have it. Speaking of jumping though, XDefiant gives away its first weak spot here.
After playing XDefiant for a few days, I’ve noticed that you can defy the laws of physics, and move around while in mid-air! This is a game-breaking feature that makes it so hard to track the opponents after they jump. It’s like you’re fighting a floating ghost, where they can switch directions mid-air. There’s also the fact that your character can do as many jumps as they can without getting tired, making the 1v1 battles a jumping contest.
This is where Call of Duty excels at delivering well-balanced movement mechanics this year with MW3. The game tries well to keep both the tactical and fast-paced shooter fans happy by giving penalties to jump-spammers. You can not move in the air while jumping, and hopping more than twice will result in fatigue of your operator; hence why Call of Duty: MW3 has a better movement mechanics than the XDefiant.
Abilities Vs. Killstreaks
Call of Duty is a military-based game that applies a sense of realism to the gameplay; not talking about Lilith performing a finisher on Homelander here. But, XDefiant is a hero shooter, which means that the doors for going crazy with bringing gadgets and elements that’d change the gameplay style to higher extents are always open.
XDefiant brings more gameplay variety, keeping you in the game for longer just so you can test and play as different heroes. And if you’re a fan of Ubisoft games, you’d be more than happy to find some of your favorite characters in the game. Unlike Call of Duty operators, XDefiant includes factions, and every one of them offers three unique abilities with their characters. It’s safe to assume that XDefiant is a mixture of Call of Duty and Overwatch in that sense.
On the other hand, we’ve got killstreaks in Call of Duty. While sweat-killing 10 enemies in a row isn’t rewarding in XDefiant, Call of Duty offers the tools of war for going on a streak to dominate the field. Remember though, this isn’t a breaking difference here. Both CoD and XDefiant deliver the best in their own style of gameplay; one featuring realistic warfare and the other introducing factions and their heroes.
However, XDefiant is a lot more team-based than Call of Duty. A better team that can take advantage of each other’s abilities will dominate in XDefiant, while a precision Call of Duty player might just finish a match of Search and Destroy all on their own.
Weapons and Attachments
The comparison of weapons and attachments in Call of Duty and XDefiant is the bet of quantity. Call of Duty HQ houses a plethora of weapons and a ton of attachments. Now if you’re a new player in Warzone and MW3, it’d be so confusing to unlock a silencer for your SMG by levelling up a nerfed shotgun. But, weapon level progression is fast and you can double that with a free token you’ll earn every season.
On the other hand, the XDefiant offers way fewer weapons, like only 4 SMGs for instance. Due to its lower range of weapon choices, XDefiant offers a balanced meta for its guns and their stats. However, you’d need to earn a ton of XP to level up every single weapon in the game. In other words, the same meta balance gets shattered when you realize that you have to do a lot of challenges and play for days only to max out a single weapon. This is while some of your opponents in the lobbies wield high-level weapons that’d tear anyone to pieces.
Call of Duty beats XDefiant both in terms of weapon variance and the time you’d need to max out each one of them. This makes up for the seasonal meta of CoD, where you’ll just find the new overpowered weapons after every major update, and spend only a few hours to grab everything you need for it.
Conclusion: Call of Duty or XDefiant?
If XDefiant is an amusement park with firecrackers above its sky, then Call of Duty is the classic-looking cafe that you’d stop by for your everyday coffee. The term “Call of Duty Killer” isn’t what we’re looking at with XDefiant, and here’s why according to all the comparisons I did above:
In movement mechanics, Call of Duty is the real winner. XDefiant feels way too clunky to the point that I miss most of my shots due to moving in a direction that I didn’t intend to; take floating in the air for example. The loadout system of CoD is crowded, but still, it’s just better than the super-slow upgrade progress of XDefiant weapons.
When Call of Duty offers so many game modes for fighting a 32v32 war, or a 10v10 in Paris or Tokyo, XDefiant falls short in maps, modes, weapons count, challenges, gunplay animations, voices, everything. The only reasons to close Call of Duty and run the Ubisoft Connect launcher to play XDefiant are the no SBMM and its different style.
With all that in mind, we should note that this is only the beginning for XDefiant. The game isn’t on the grand scale of Call of Duty, but it can definitely draw more attention by improving its shortcomings and fixing the net code that prevents players from registering their shots.
