The old concept of 'rodeo'-where a player can mantle an enemy titan to cripple them-has been reworked. In Titanfall, every player matters and every system encourages teamwork. I have always preferred this type of teamplay to pure deathmatch or the map-spanning grind of Battlefield. I've called in titans to disrupt the enemy's defenders ahead of a flag-run and given chase to a fleeing capper with grappling hook and jetpack. I'm glad that Respawn chose to move against the current. Titanfall's systems are perfect for CTF, a mode that has gone out of favour among developers in favour of less teamplay-intensive forms of competition. It's a little overcomplicated, but impressive in that it crams almost all of Titanfall's competitive structures into a single mode.Ĭapture The Flag is a favourite, but best with a team of friends. One example is Bounty Hunt, a combination of deathmatch, marked target hunting and point-capture that sees teams race to collect bounties and deposit them in periodically-available banks.
There are familiar point-capture, deathmatch and titan warfare modes, though many of these feature tweaks that take a little getting used to. An old-school degree of finesse is possible here, and when you watch from the perspective of a good player-usually via the kill cam after they've killed you-you'll realise just how much skill it's possible to express by carefully chaining slides, jumps and wall-runs. It's extremely fast-paced and highly lethal, with grappling hooks, speed boosts and phase-shift abilities raising the skill ceiling of movement.
It is as if Respawn laid out Titanfall on a table, took it to pieces, and figured out how to create a new game with the same essential parts. All of the same ideas return, from freerunning pilots to titan calldowns to NPC minions and limited-use power spikes, but each has been rethought. If Titanfall 2's singleplayer surprises with quality, then multiplayer surprises with the amount that has changed since the first game.
It might not stick with you long after the credits roll, but the strength of the campaign as a whole is enough to make me want to spend more time in this world, to find out what other unexpected ingredients Respawn can introduce to the formula of man plus robot plus guns plus parkour. The central dynamic between protagonist Jack Cooper and the titan he is unexpectedly bonded with, BT, is perfectly enjoyable-The Iron Giant with killstreaks. The story is above-average triple-A action fare, punching above its weight in terms of spectacle and managing to fit in a few decent jokes amidst the battle-talk. If you're building a new PC, also take a look at our mid-range and high-end build guides.
Also, a robot is your best friend.įor an assessment of how Titanfall 2 runs on both midrange and high-end PC hardware, check out our analysis of how it performs. Blazkowicz, the Predator, and Faith from Mirror's Edge. On the hardest difficulty setting you can't actually take very much fire before you die: it's fundamentally a game about not taking any fire at all. In a sense, Titanfall 2 uses cloaking and your freedom of movement to stand in for the bullet-sponge healthbar usually granted to first person shooter protagonists. You've also got a short-duration cloaking device, gated by a cooldown, that allows you to reposition in dangerous situations without needing to stop and hide. Shooting is a form of punctuation in Titanfall-it's through movement that you really express yourself, to the point that resorting to boring old running on the ground can feel like failure. This is coupled with the series' brilliant traversal system, which spans double jumps, wall-runs, slides, and powerful melee strikes.
These feel and sound phenomenal-Respawn's legacy as Infinity Ward, the people who invented Call of Duty, is sensed in the simple kinetic pleasure of putting a target in your red-dot sight and pulling the trigger. There's loads of weapons to try, from SMG staples to powerful shotgun pistols to gravity grenades and remote satchel charges.
Titanfall 2 is built on rock-solid foundations.