Unlike most people I didn’t think the original Titanfall not having a single-player campaign was a particular problem. It tied into the general malaise the game had of not providing anywhere near enough content for players to get their teeth into – the central multiplayer experience, while very finely polished and a lot of fun, was also rather limited — but I don’t feel like Titanfall was crying out for a thrilling narrative-driven tale of conflict between the two generic sides involved in its eternal robot war. What it was crying out for were more game modes, more Titans and more maps, and when these were not forthcoming the game swiftly died out as its playerbase deserted it.  I’m fine with games focusing solely on multiplayer as long as they’re up front about it, especially since the requirements of crafting a single-player campaign are often quite at odds with the requirements of a highly-tuned multiplayer game, not to mention being incredibly resource-intensive, and trying to focus on both often means you end up doing neither particularly well¹.

“Most people” would disagree with me on that one, though. By far the most common criticism that I saw of Titanfall was, in fact, that it didn’t have a single-player campaign. This is why Titanfall 2’s headline improvement over the original isn’t more Titans or a more comprehensive progression system for multiplayer (although it has those too), but is instead a single-player campaign chronicling the adventures of Jack Pilot² and his Titan buddy BT as they participate in a botched militia attack on an Evil Corporation research facility on Typhon. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting much more of this campaign than a glorified exercise in box-ticking in the hope that its mere existence would widen Titanfall 2’s appeal. I didn’t think it would be bad, as such – developers Respawn presumably consist of some of the more talented bits of CoD progenitors Infinity Ward, after all — but anything CoD-like these days ends up feeling derivative in spite of itself and so I figured Titanfall 2’s campaign had its sights firmly set on being merely average.

To be fair, some parts of it are quite average. It doesn’t really have a plot, for example, merely a selection of 10 not-really-connected levels designed around individual setpieces and gimmicks, with very little narrative or characterisation gluing them together. I also think the general visual style of Titanfall 2 is rather uninspired. I believe my hatred of levels set inside gigantic concrete boxes is well documented and Titanfall 2’s single-player campaign unfortunately has a few too many of these locations. The thing is, though, that the areas Titanfall 2 skimps on are arguably the least-important ones for an FPS; nobody complained that the Doom reboot didn’t have a thrilling story and it still received near-universal critical acclaim. In the areas where it counts — movement, gunplay, and generally throwing new things at the player so that they never get bored — Titanfall 2 excels in some quite unexpected ways.

The Titanfall series has two signature features. The first are the eponymous Titans: large stompy robots which are called in from orbit in multiplayer, but the campaign pairs you up with a dedicated robo-bro pretty early on who acts as the omnipresent voice in your ear telling you to do stuff.  Accommodating Titan gameplay in the single-player campaign isn’t that hard since it’s basically just an overgrown vehicle segment and the FPS genre has been doing those for decades. The second feature is a little harder to deal with: when a player pops out of their Titan they become an absurdly mobile wallrunning, jetpack-boosting Pilot, and blending these movement mechanics into the single-player requires some very careful thought in how you structure the level geometry so that players can properly take advantage of their mobility. I’ve seen it done badly in Black Ops 3, where the player’s ability to wallrun was almost ignored in favour of traditional (and traditionally boring) level design where you crouch behind cover and headshot baddies crouching behind their own cover, so it’s very possible to fuck this up.

I am happy to say that Titanfall 2 most certainly does not. Partly this is down to TF2’s version of wallrunning being far more fluid and easy-to-use than CoD’s, but mostly it is because Respawn are absolutely unafraid of giving the player so much power they feel like an unmitigated badass. You could play Titanfall 2 like CoD, sitting behind cover with a sniper rifle and picking enemies off as they run around like headless chickens, and Titanfall 2 would accommodate you, although it would be a substantially diminished experience. If you’re ever aiming down sights in this game you’re doing it wrong, however; in fact every moment you spend touching the floor means you’re not double-jumping off a wall firing an SMG one-handed at the cluster of helplessly-floating baddies you just caught with your gravity star. The enemies are pretty much the standard PMC soldiers we’ve been fighting in a lot of military FPSes for years now — albeit with a few robots and heavy troopers mixed in — but this merely accentuates how utterly ridiculous the Pilots are by comparison; when everything is flowing just right the experience of playing one is not a million miles away from being the guy in the intro video. The only thing that really ensures your adversaries are a challenge is their sheer weight of numbers — and unlike CoD you spend most of the campaign fighting solo with no NPC buddies to draw fire for you.

The Pilot fighting segments are a lot of fun, then, and they’re spiced up with the addition of what amount to very short and sweet platforming bits where you use your mobility to get to a goal or find a MacGuffin or whatever. The level design here does start to smack a little of the whole “Why is there a bottomless pit in the Emperor’s throne room on the Death Star?” thing since there’s a lot of needlessly deep chasms inside this research facility for you to fall into if you put a foot wrong, but I’m fine with Titanfall 2 ditching logical level layouts just so long as the end result poses an interesting challenge. I will also say that despite my complaint about the slightly-bland visual style above, the actual level concepts are downright inspired in a couple of places; there’s a really good one where you’re leaping and fighting over what essentially amounts to a gigantic assembly line that makes full-size towns. Titanfall 2 feels like it takes the CoD approach of basing each level around a gimmick to its logical conclusion, but where CoD would make whatever the gimmick was quite restrictive in how you could use it, Titanfall 2 fully embraces it and explores what would be possible if you could use or interact with the gimmick the whole time you were playing it.

It’s this philosophy that underpins Titanfall 2’s best pair of levels, and I’m slightly annoyed that talking about exactly why they’re so good would amount to a particularly egregious spoiler; I’ll just have to settle for describing my initial reaction, which went something along the lines of “Wait, are they… they’re not…  they are, they’re actually letting me do this.” The rest of the campaign is a great evolution of the CoD style of FPS — and perhaps the first genuine progress that’s been made there since the original Modern Warfare — but it’s here that Titanfall 2 momentarily transcends those origins and becomes something entirely new that could have potentially challenged for Best FPS Of The Last Decade had Respawn succeeded in bottling that lightning the whole way through the game. That the rest of it is merely very good rather than outstanding is no failure on their part whatsoever, however; Titanfall 2’s single-player campaign is far better than it has any real right to be, and it feels like the game CoD keeps trying — and failing — to be. It has its weak points, sure, but since it’s just under five hours long and keeps cycling through new ideas anything that you might find underwhelming isn’t going to be around long enough for it to get on your nerves.

Still, Titanfall 2 is an expensive game. While I do think the short length of the campaign is an asset, the reason I have that opinion is because I bought it primarily for the multiplayer and the fact that it unexpectedly had a rather fun single-player campaign attached was very much a bonus. If you’re interested in any kind of long-term investment the multiplayer is where you’ll find it, and fortunately I have good news here too: the Titanfall 2 multiplayer is better than original Titanfall multiplayer, which is quite the accomplishment. Broadly it’s the same deal, with small teams of Pilots duking it out in a variety of matchmade game modes, but there’s a whole host of structural changes that turn it into a much leaner and slicker prospect than the original game. It’s still got the CoD-inspired loadout system for Pilots, complete with unlockable perks and the ability to level up and prestige — sorry, I mean “regenerate” — any piece of equipment, and this has even been made a little more interesting with the addition of selectable Pilot abilities that give them speed boosts, cloak, phase jump etc. The Titan loadout system has been scaled right back, however; instead of three classes of Titan with a broad range of equipment, there are now six classes of Titan with static equipment and abilities. This, oddly, is an improvement, as the static loadouts ensure that each Titan can be tuned for a particular role — I’m particularly fond of the Pilot-sniping Ion, with the missile-spewing Tone coming in a close second.

How you call your Titans in has also undergone a big change — possibly the biggest in the multiplayer. Previously it was a flat two minute countdown to getting your Titan and killing things shaved precious seconds off of this countdown, which I liked; it meant that no matter how well you were doing you’d always get to call in a Titan eventually. Now it’s a bar in the corner of the screen that fills up as you kill stuff and do damage; it does passively fill on its own, but the fill rate at the start of a match is desperately slow and so mowing down players and AI grunts is the only way to call in a Titan in the first half of a match. I don’t think I like this system quite so much as it rewards players who are doing well with the means to do even better, while players who are having a slow match desperately struggle to fill the last 30% of their Titan bar — by the time you’ve made up the difference the enemy team can be fifty points ahead thanks to their Titan advantage. The only thing that stops it being an overwhelming one is that Titans are now incredibly vulnerable to Pilots; the Titan will always win a one-on-one match (at least if the Pilot is dumb enough to actually show their face once the Titan knows they’re there), but a two-on-one match forces the Titan pilot to split their attention while they get their health bar whittled down by grenades, and damaging an enemy Titan is a great way to fill your own Titan bar.

There’s actually a surprising amount dependent on the Titan bar, come to think of it. Burn cards have been replaced by boost powerups (amped weapons, Tick mines, X-ray vision) that can be activated once the Titan bar fills to a certain point. Once you have your Titan the Titan bar becomes the charge-up for your Titan’s Core Ability, which differs depending on which class you’re playing but boils down to “do a shitload of damage” – as Titans are quite fragile now, charging the Core before your Titan gets destroyed is actually fairly tricky. As everyone ran Electric Smoke to counter Rodeo-ing Pilots this has now been turned into an innate Titan ability that becomes available once you get 30% Core charge. Rodeoing itself has been changed so that you can’t one-shot a Titan via a single rodeo; instead leaping onto a Titan as a Pilot now causes you to yank out a battery that you can then scurry away with to insert into a friendly Titan, and doing both parts of this will completely fill your Titan bar. You’ll probably die before you reach a friendly Titan, though, thanks to both the omnipresent Electric Smoke and the fact that stealing a battery lights you up like a christmas tree in the HUD of the Titan you just stole it from.

Concerns about snowballing aside, having static Titan classes with distinct abilities and basing everything else around charging the Titan bar is a much more understandable system. When you see an enemy Titan you’ll know exactly what it can do. You’ll know to circle around and attack a Legion from the side, and you’ll know never to get a Ronin get in close. You know not to let Tone get a lock on you for a missile barrage, you know never to let Ion see you if you’re a Pilot (the laser is a one-shot kill, and you learn to treat ejecting Pilots kind of like skeet shooting when you’re driving an Ion), and you know that it’s safe to rodeo a Titan if they’ve just called it in (and so don’t have enough charge for Electric Smoke) but that it’s probably going to kill you otherwise. Pilots on the other hand have a much wider range of possibility in their loadouts, but the time-to-kill in this game is so short that map awareness, reaction time and the ability to shoot straight counts for way more than what specific gun each player is holding and the Pilot loadout becomes more a case of personal preference than anything else. Getting the drop on somebody is 90% of winning a gunfight, and the wallrunning is so good that you have a practically infinite number of ways of doing this if you just think smart.

I think on reflection that the balance of power has shifted a little too far towards the Titans in spite of their increased vulnerability. I’ve played many games that were incredibly close (including one that we won 500-499 after I spent the last 30 seconds ignoring the Titan v Titan scrum in the middle of the map and instead went around frantically smashing up Reapers to make up the last 30 points) but I’ve played an equal number where the first team to call in a Titan won – not because it was particularly effective at mopping up Pilots, but because the space it created allowed the rest of the team to charge up their Titan bars and call in their Titans. This is absolutely not an advantage that can overcome a coordinated enemy team, though, and hopefully as the playerbase gets better at the game it’ll be less of a problem (indeed, I’m starting to rank up now and while there’s been plenty of one-sided scorelines it’s often a team that comes from behind to win it). My other big complaint about the multiplayer is that they removed the AI mooks from most game modes, and in the two where they’re still present they’re far less polished, moving around in big clumps that don’t shoot at enemy AI and basically just function as big points pinatas that can be used to charge the Titan/Core bar. It feels far more gamey now and not like you’re being dropped into a battle at all; I thought the AI added a hell of a lot to Titanfall’s multiplayer, to the point where I was convinced it’d be one of the first things that other developers would copy, and I’m disappointed that it’s been scaled back the way it has here.

Broadly, though, I feel that the changes that have been made to multiplayer are a net improvement on the already-great multiplayer of the original Titanfall. I’ve played it for twenty hours now, and I think the last game I enjoyed this much in multiplayer was the late lamented Section 8: Prejudice. Partly my sinking this much time into it has been motivated by the fear than in a month’s time the playerbase might not exist any more. Releasing Titanfall 2 at the same time as both the Battlefield and CoD franchises has to be one of the most monumentally idiotic things I’ve ever seen a publisher do³, and not just because it might kill one of the best shooters of recent years stone cold dead — it can’t have been cheap to make, and I’d have thought EA would at least want to get a decent return on their investment. I’m really hoping that they rather shamefacedly give it some decent post-release support that ensures it has a long tail. Mostly, though, I’m playing a lot of Titanfall 2 because it’s just really really good fun.

The post Thoughts: Titanfall 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I think it’s time to admit I have a giant robot problem.

How else to explain my buying Titanfall, the Next Game Experience from the makers of the creatively bankrupt Call of Duty series? A couple of weeks back I called Hawken Call of Duty with robots, but that isn’t precisely true. Hawken is Call of Duty in robots. It’s Titanfall that’s Call of Duty with robots, and I have to say that the merging of the part of the game where you run around as a weak, fleshy Pilot with the part of the game where you’re stomping around in your Titan crushing all beneath your giant metal feet is absolutely inspired. It provides what nearly every single giant robot game has been missing up until this point: a sense of scale. You cannot understand just how big these things are until you’ve had to fight them as a human travelling on foot, and Titanfall marks the first time I’ve truly bought into my giant robot actually being giant rather than a normal-sized robot wandering around in a curiously undersized world.

This dual-mode gameplay is the first innovation Titanfall brings to the multiplayer shooter arena, although it’s far from the last. At the start of each match, every player deploys from a dropship as a Pilot – the first-person cutscene where your team leaps out of the dropship as a group is one of the many neat touches characterising the game –  along with a whole bunch of friendly AI bots who get fired into the battlefield via drop pod. Somewhere not too far away is a group of enemy Pilots and bots doing exactly the same thing, and it takes just 10-15 seconds for the two groups to make contact and the fighting to start. This is the phase of the game that’s most like CoD (Modern Warfare 1 era) and they do share some very obvious strands of the same DNA. The weapons, for starters: you can have your choice of primary weapon consisting of the usual suspects (SMG, shotgun, assault rifle) and a pistol sidearm, and these all kill in just a few rounds. Your loadout also comes with two passive perks, a grenade option and a timed tactical ability like cloaking or see-through-walls-o-vision. The basic setup and gunplay is very similar, then, but Titanfall then takes a massive leap into the chasm of originality with two more of its innovations: those AI bots I mentioned, and the Pilot’s innate parkour abilities.

The parkour in Titanfall is an absolute joy to behold. It’s intuitive, powerful and – this is the important part – incredibly easy to pick up. Pilots get a double jump, and if they leap up to a ledge that’s at head height they can mantle up onto it by holding W. Wallrunning is as simple as jumping into a wall and running forward; Pilots can wallrun a fair distance and once they run out of wallrun they get their double jump recharged, making it very easy to chain multiple wallruns together. Pilots also get infinite sprint. As a result they are ridiculously mobile; all of these abilities working in concert turn infantry combat in Titanfall into an excellent hybrid of Modern Warfare and Unreal Tournament. It’s certainly miles better than the parkour on display in the decidedly lacklustre Brink.

The bots on the other hand add a lot of flavour to what would otherwise be very sparsely populated maps (Titanfall is 6v6 only). There’s about 15-20 of them on either side at any one time, constantly spawning and duking it out with the other side’s bot troopers. When you’re a Pilot the bots are pretty much cannon fodder, going down in a couple of shots each and posing almost no threat whatsoever unless you let yourself get surrounded. When you’re in a Titan they’re a little more dangerous; the bots will hide in buildings and shoot missiles at your rampaging colossus, and while the damage these missiles do is still not great, if you’re already under attack from another Titan it can be enough to tilt an otherwise even matchup in their favour. In real terms, though, the bots are in the game for two reasons. One is to provide camouflage and distraction so that it’s always difficult to identify enemy Pilots in a melee, greatly extending their lifespan in an environment populated by angry metal giants. The other is to let players live out their fantasies of crushing soldiers beneath their mighty feet; going on a bot killing spree in a Titan is just so immensely satisfying and lends them a sense of power that they might not otherwise have. It actually put me in mind of ancient Amiga classic Walker at one point, which is never a bad thing.

But how do you transition from clambering around the map as a squishy, vulnerable Pilot to striding about it in a heavily armoured Titan? Well, at the start of the match a timer will begin counting down from two minutes. Killing enemy bots and pilots knocks a few seconds off of this timer every time you do it, so the better you do the faster the timer will decrement to zero, but even the worst player will have it run out after two minutes. Once it’s there, you can call in a Titan from orbit and, after a brief delay, climb inside of it and start dispensing whatever particular brand of robot mayhem you’ve chosen in the loadout. Titan loadouts are broadly similar to Pilot loadouts – a primary weapon, two perks, an activated ability and some missile-based ordanance that recharges after it’s fired – with the difference that the weapons and abilities are orders of magnitude more destructive since they’re all designed for fighting other Titans. The “weakest” Titan weapon is a giant machine gun capable of killing a Pilot in a single hit. They also have access to a 40mm cannon, quad rocket launchers, plasma guns, and if somehow all of this stuff fails to kill their target they can simply crush infantry underfoot. Titans have shields that recharge and a health bar that doesn’t; once the health bar is reduced to zero the Titan enters Doomed mode, where the health bar will refill and slowly tick down to zero while an on-screen prompt urges you to eject. You can still pilot the Titan while in Doomed mode, but if you’re still in it when the health bar empties your Titan will explode and take you with it – which is something of a concern when enemies can speed the depletion of the Doomed health bar by continuing to shoot at you.

Titans are very powerful, there’s no denying that. Not only will they likely kill you if they see you, but thanks to the Doomed mechanic it’s very difficult to outright kill a player who is piloting a Titan. Most of the time they’ll just eject and rejoin the fight, content in the knowledge that they’ll get another Titan in a maximum of two minutes’ time. However, Titanfall balances their power by giving Pilots a number of ways in which they can take out the Titan, if not the player inside it. All Pilots have a third anti-Titan weapon that they can use to chip away at a Titan’s shields and armour; like the bots, one Pilot is unlikely to take down a full health Titan on their own this way but they can easily finish off a critically damaged one. Then there’s Pilot mobility, which is a great equaliser; Titans are slow to maneuver (although they move surprisingly quickly in a straight line) making it difficult to draw a bead on a fast-moving Pilot target.  There’s plenty of places Pilots can get to where Titans can’t go, and when you’re inside a Titan you become rather wary of urban environments since the buildings provide plenty of cover for Pilots to ambush you with their anti-Titan weaponry or – even worse – jump on your back and attempt to sabotage your Titan directly.

This is the Rodeo mechanic, which is a natural progression of the parkour and an excellent addition to the game. Jump up next to a Titan and press E (a risky business, since they can flatten you very easily if they suddenly move in the wrong direction) and your Pilot will attach themselves to the Titan’s back, popping off a armoured panel and levelling their weapon at the critical systems exposed within. By unloading several magazines worth of ammunition into this circuitry you can cause rapid damage to a Titan that ignores Titan shielding; if the Titan pilot does nothing to remove you from their back then you can bring them down in fairly short order. Of course the Titan does have a conspicuous warning indicator telling the pilot that you’re doing this, and they’ll usually respond in one of three ways:

1)      They’ll disembark from the Titan to try and shoot you. Normally when a player gets out of their Titan it gets taken over by a self-defence AI that is limited but effective, but Rodeoing a Titan disables this AI so it’s up to the player to kill the Rodeo-ing Pilot. As the Rodeo-er, you learn to get the hell off once you see the Titan enter its disembark animation and (hopefully) get the pilot before he can get you. As a result this is not really an effective method of dealing with any uninvited guests who have hitched a ride.

2)      They’ll deploy Electric Smoke. This is one of the Titan abilities that smothers the immediate area surrounding it in electrified smog that will damage and kill anyone caught inside it, and it’s my preferred method of dealing with Rodeoing Pilots since the smoke is also very handy for my last-ditch Titan maneuver, which I’ll get to in a second.

3)      They’ll fire their Cluster Missiles at the ground underneath them. Cluster Missiles also do persistent area damage, and while in this case it’ll damage the Titan too you’ll die before the Titan does.

Unless you’re doing it in the middle of an intense firefight when the pilot is likely to be distracted, Rodeoing is unlikely to result in the death of a Titan. What it will do is force the pilot to spend time dealing with you, and unless they have Electric Smoke this is not something that’s done easily – while you’re distracted, an enemy Titan will likely appear and start punting high-explosive 40mm cannon rounds into your armour. Titan on Titan combat is a somewhat slow affair thanks to their innate toughness, and one-on-one fights rarely end in a kill because of the Titans’ ability to retreat and recharge their shields. A Titan with a Pilot supporting them is a much more serious threat thanks to the Pilot’s ability to tip the scales in their teammate’s favour, while you’re unlikely to survive a fight against multiple enemy Titans unless you’re very good or very sneaky. My preferred tactic when faced with an unwinnable fight is to back around a corner, pop my smoke and then activate the Titan self-destruct, which is amped up with a perk that turns it nuclear. Everyone expects a Doomed Titan to go nuclear and will back away accordingly, but nobody thinks you’ll intentionally activate the self-destruct on half-health and so will likely charge into the smoke for those precious, precious points, only to be greeted by the painfully white glow of a Titan reactor going critical on the other side. The best part is that thanks to the excellent eject animation (where you mash the E key frantically and watch your pilot yank the ejection lever under his seat) I get to watch all this from a hundred metres up, and it’s never not hilarious.

Titanfall is full of awesome little touches like that. I was entranced when I came across two groups of bots fighting each other and saw that they had special kill animations; a combat robot lifted a grunt above his head, smashed him down onto a countertop and then slid him along and off onto the floor. The bot chatter is great as well – I especially like the grunt who panics after his entire squad is killed – and it all does a great job of drawing you into the game. The basic Titanfall experience of entering a multiplayer match and killing dudes for fifteen minutes is about as polished as anything really can be, and (unusually for EA these days) I haven’t had a single connection problem since I started playing it on Friday night.

As ever with my reviews, though, it’s time for the other giant armoured boot to drop, and Titanfall’s big problem is that the basic multiplayer experience is all there is. It’s fucking great, to be sure, but it absolutely has to be because without it there wouldn’t be a game here at all; the “campaign” is just a series of gussied up multiplayer matches where talking heads spew soundbites that you’re not listening to because you’re too focused on staying alive, and there’s no game customisation options to spice up the decidedly limited selection of game modes on offer. There’s Attrition (team deathmatch in all but name), Hardpoints (domination), Capture the Flag (where you can grab the flag and then climb into a Titan, making it impossible to bring you down), and then Last Titan Standing and Pilot Hunt (or something) which both cut out a key part of what makes Titanfall Titanfall: the interaction between the Pilots and the Titans.  You can’t adjust point totals so Attrition is always to a cap of 250 while Hardpoints goes up to 500, and this never changes. The maps are varied and well designed but when you get down to it I just don’t think there’s enough material here to promote long-term play, no matter how good the core gameplay experience is. Titanfall is great for dropping in and playing two or three matches in the space of half an hour, but I can’t play for longer than that because otherwise it gets too repetitive – and if I think that two days after I started playing it, I really don’t think I’ll still be playing it in two weeks’ time.

This longevity issue makes it hard to recommend Titanfall, even if it is an excellent multiplayer shooter; and that goes double considering it’s more than a little pricey for a PC game.  If you’re on the fence about picking it up now, I’d say pick it up now. If on the other hand you were planning on picking it up six months down the line when it got a little cheaper I’d do a little research into the health of the community before you fork over any cash. It could turn out okay – I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before – but its single-minded reliance on lobby-based matchmaking means it’s more vulnerable than most to a slump in player numbers, and I doubt the PC population will be quite as robust as on Xbox One, where Titanfall is the primary reason a lot of people bought the console. If you’re still interested, though, I think you and Titanfall will probably get along just fine. It’s fun, fast and fluid, and the gameplay has been polished to a fine mirror shine. I just wish there was a little more breadth to the game, is all.

The post Thoughts: Titanfall. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.