TV tie-in MMO looter shooter Defiance returns for a free-to-play third shot at life and gigantic messy boss battles

Admit it, we all have an MMO of questionable pedigree that we could happily sink dozens more hours into. Unfortunately for me, mine was Defiance. Yep, the one that ran alongside the moderately popular sci-fi (sorry, SyFy) TV show. Defunct twice over as both a retail game and the F2P relaunch Defiance 2050, it’s now back from the dead once more under new publisher Fawkes Games, and I’ve got my fingers tightly crossed that the new owners will be able to keep it running long into its twilight years—even if they’ve got little planned in the way of fresh content.

For those who didn’t play it when it was originally running, I’d describe Defiance as a massively multiplayer Borderlands, with all the looting, shooting and driving around that entails.

While playable solo or with a 4-player group in co-op, the most interesting moments came from big quests and events in the overworld (similar to Guild Wars 2) that pit dozens of players against huge bosses with massive health pools or big swarms of regular monsters to earn high-tier loot drops. Simple and satisfying popcorn gaming, and some of the guns—especially explosives—were fun and messy to play with.

The TV show wasn’t too shabby either. A bit like Deadwood with more lasers. It was about a whole mess of bickering human and alien factions butting heads over a frontier town on post-apocalyptic Earth, the planet ruined by a messy war between humanity and the Votanis Collective, a Covenant-esque alien coalition. It ran for three seasons, with a few in-game live events that ran parallel to the show. Nothing too dramatic, but it made for an interesting setting for a shooter, and you can meet some of the TV characters in-game.

While I’m pretty happy with what I’ve seen so far of this re-release, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops, based on the few minutes I’ve played. Most notably, this is a total relaunch for the game under new ownership, which means that anyone who owned the old retail version gets nothing transferred over. This means that cosmetics are pretty limited, and players can only create Human and Irathient characters, while the albino Castithan aliens are for paying customers only. There’s also the usual assortment of boosters and perks available if you put money down, but unless they’ve nerfed the game balance, I don’t see myself wanting any of those.

On the technical front, most things seem fine, but while ultrawide monitors are broadly supported (fittingly enough), I noticed some HUD elements like enemy health bars rendering off-center, which looked a little bit funky. Hopefully that's a minor kink that can be hammered out. From what I’ve seen, all of the content from the game’s latter years is here in this relaunched version, so expect some pretty tough encounters if you bump into the Volge: giant armored lads with pointy helmets and big arm cannons. I remember them being pretty tough cookies.

The Defiance reboot is live now and free to play, although not on Steam. You’ll have to grab the launcher from Fawkes Games directly here and download the game through it, just like we used to do in the horse and buggy days. Nostalgic, huh?