After my first few rounds of Titanfall, hearing the “Your titan is now ready” notification began to induce a Pavlovian adrenaline-rush response. I still catch myself looking up to the sky as I press down on the D-pad to call it in, because watching my 20-foot-tall robot exosuit fall onto the battlefield, seemingly from Heaven, is a glorious sight that I still see replaying when I close my eyes at night. It’s a signal that I’m about to transition from the liberating mobility of a jetpack-powered, wall-running soldier (called a pilot) to the ego-swelling walking tank that punches enemy players midair as they try to leap on its back and squashes AI-controlled minions with heavy metal feet. It’s more than a “Call of Duty with mechs” gimmick – Titanfall turns out to be an invigorating multiplayer first-person shooter that melds fresh mechanics with familiar ones, creating a new watercooler moment almost every time I play. I only wish there was more of it, and that it was easier to fight my friends.
Unlike a Call of Duty or Battlefield game, Titanfall is purely focused on its excellent 6v6 multiplayer. It cannot be played alone, except for the optional (but helpful) tutorial, or via system link – you’re completely dependent on a connection to Microsoft’s dedicated servers. There’s a laudable attempt to infuse a two-sided campaign into the multiplayer through a fixed set and order of nine of the 15 maps, in which NPC faction commanders give context to the goals and game modes of each battleground. Having played through it on both sides, though, I couldn’t tell you what it’s about, other than that the IMC and Militia factions are at war. Trying to stay alive in a brawl with human-controlled bad guys is too distracting, and without controllable lulls in the fighting, most of the story is reduced to background noise.
What’s impressive about the balance of Titanfall is that somehow, as empowering as it is to play as Goliath, David still has more than a fighting chance thanks to their many equippable abilities. Cloaking renders a soldier (called a pilot) nearly invisible to the metal giants, while the stims grant you temporary cheetah speed with which to chase them down from the ground, walls, or rooftops. One of Titanfall’s great strengths is the simplicity and natural feel of movement. Whether you’re jetpack-jumping and wall-running as a pilot, or dashing around with your titan’s lateral jets, you just aim at where you want to go and press A. You’ll never wrestle with a video game-y quick-time event or button-mashing sequence in order to execute a badass move. It always happens in the most straightforward way it can.
For example, once you get in close to a titan as a pilot, a simple double-tap of the jump button from any angle allows you to maneuver up onto its shoulder, pop the cover on the titan’s head, and literally start shooting its brains out. In fact, as tense as a titan(s) vs. titan(s) showdown can be, darting into that fray as a squishy mortal can be an intoxicating mix of stupidity and genius. Of course, the titans’ counter to that move is Electric Smoke, one of many unlockable kit items you can equip your metallic avatar with as you level up. It serves as both a visibility-killing distraction – be it for flanking maneuvers or a wounded escape – and also a pilot bug-zapper that will shake off any foes who “rodeo” your titan.
Each of the three archetypal titan varieties feels different and has its situational usefulness. If you prefer to go toe-to-toe, equip the Ogre with the Triple Threat grenade launcher, kit it out with the Particle Wall force field that temporarily protects you from incoming fire on one side, and you’ll pack a devastating punch. But if you do, the nimble, dash-happy Stryder can actually run circles around you, peppering you with chaingun fire and bombarding you with the cluster bomb ordnance ability as it goes. I came to prefer one extreme or the other, but the jack-of-all-trades Atlas is a bit more malleable for loadout experimentation. I find the 40mm gauss-like cannon to be a great happy medium of short and long-range combat in the Atlas, and pairing that with the rocket salvo ordnance – which locks missiles onto your target – allows it to capably throw down with both Stryders and Ogres.
Meanwhile, there are two economies behind Titanfall that are each as finely balanced as they are smart. One is the nearly ubiquitous XP-based grind that unlocks new gear and perks. By the time you reach level 50 (where you can then reset to level 1 by “regenerating,” sacrificing all of your unlocks in exchange for a faster XP-gain rate and a fancy tag in the matchmaking lobby), you’ll have many more options at your disposal – but not necessarily more inherently powerful ones. An anti-titan grenade launcher is certainly a different tool with which to try bringing down the big guys when on foot, but it’s not fundamentally superior to the Sidewinder rocket launcher you have available from level 1.
Progression in Titanfall brings more options than advantages, even when factoring in the “burn cards” – single-use perks that last the duration of one life, earned for completing various baked-in challenges and scenarios. For instance, one card might grant you unlimited frag grenades. Another could reduce your titan build time by a whopping 40 seconds. Burn cards can tip the scales in battle when played correctly, but they never turn you into a demigod. And in today’s microtransaction-obsessed world, I have to commend developer Respawn for resisting the urge to charge us for them (or anything else in Titanfall).
The other economy fuels the titan delivery system in each match. Killing the multiple classes of utterly braindead AI-controlled minions that fill out Titanfall’s conflicts shaves a couple seconds off of your titan deployment timer, while offing pilots hastens it even more. Felling titans, of course, gets you into your mech the quickest. The sooner you’re able to get your titan back on the battlefield, the more powerful you become. And yet, you’re never invulnerable. So while it may seem like the AI soldiers are worthless fodder that rarely pose a threat, they do play a valuable role.
Notice a theme here? Balance. Titanfall’s weapons, abilities, and gameplay systems all play together very nicely. Every action has a counter-action, and every weapon and ability a strategic use. The auto-targeting Smart Pistol, for instance, is my favorite sidearm since the Halo 1 pistol, but its relatively limited range and need to get a three to five-second lock-on leaves you vulnerable to counterattack and keeps it from feeling cheap.
Besides its balance, map variety is what will give Titanfall its legs. The 15 battlefields range in quality from very good to great. The desert-y “Boneyard” falls into the former category – its distinctive ziplines accelerate map traversal while flying dragon-like creatures provide intimidating set dressing, but sadly cannot be interacted with. The tiny village “Colony,” on the other hand, is among Titanfall’s best maps. On it, tightly packed houses make trading bullets while jumping from one angled rooftop to another an experience wholly unlike the action happening on the ground or in the wide-open, titan-friendly perimeter.
Technically speaking, those battles look impressive, but my eyeballs remain un-melted. Titans, pilots, maps, and weapon effects are all perfectly acceptable, save for the occasional dip below the otherwise-normal 60 frames per second in a huge multi-titan explosion or the ugly talking head of your faction leader before you exit your dropship at the start of a match. The omission of split-screen play is perhaps an unfortunate side effect of keeping things running smoothly.
Xbox 360 Version
Delightfully, the Xbox 360 version of Titanfall plays just as fast and (almost) as fluid as its Xbox One and PC counterparts. Every map, mode, and feature is here, right down to – perhaps most importantly – its lag-free dedicated servers.
As expected, Titanfall on Xbox 360 has much lower-quality textures than the Xbox One or PC editions. But by 360 standards it doesn’t look half bad, although it’s nowhere near the prettiest shooter on the platform, and it does suffer from very noticeable texture pop-in, particularly when a titan drops in. However, the action moves so fast that it stopped bothering me very quickly. Similarly, load times seem a touch quicker than on Xbox One, even though you can’t install the whole game to your hard drive (a 1GB install is mandatory, however).
Meanwhile, the Xbox 360 version offers up an interesting choice in its options menu: whether or not to lock the framerate at 30fps. I preferred to do so, rather than have it fluctuate between what appears to be the 30s and 40s, sometimes causing screen tearing. The capped framerate makes Titanfall feel just as good as Halo in the smoothness department.
All of the maps adapt very well to each of Titanfall’s game modes, but that’s largely due to how they’re mostly slight variations on the strong main concept. Last Titan Standing issues everyone a titan from the get-go and makes teamwork and flanking strategies essential, while the threat of titans carrying the flag crowns CTF as an especially appealing team exercise. Attrition is point-based team deathmatch, making use of the aforementioned enemy-pecking-order economy, while Hardpoint Domination is like Battlefield’s Conquest and myriad other similar modes over the years. And then there’s Pilot Hunter, which is identical to Attrition except that destroying titans carries no payoff if the pilot can safely eject before detonation, because your team only earns points for killing pilots. And… that’s it. Titanfall is going to need some new, spicier game modes, stat.
Its far graver online sin, especially considering its online-only focus, is its lack of private matches. (Respawn promises to deliver those “soon” in a free update.) Despite the fact that Halo 2 wrote the blueprint for this a decade ago, Titanfall does not allow 12 friends to gather in a lobby and play together on the game type, map, and options of their choosing. The best you can do is a party of six, where you’re still stuck warring against online strangers with no say in what map you’ll fight on. This is unforgivable in a modern multiplayer shooter, particularly one that’s exclusively team-oriented (there are, in fact, precisely zero free-for-all modes).
On a related note, Titanfall also bafflingly lacks the ability to vote on the next map when in matchmaking. And one other one: why too can’t we give personalized names to our custom pilot and titan loadouts? You eventually get five slots and, thanks to how the best loadouts vary wildly based on the map and mode you’re playing, you’ll need them all. I badly wanted to be able to rename my “Custom Pilot 3” to “Shotty Hardpoint,” as that slot’s combination of an upgraded EVA-8 shotgun with a perk that lets me briefly see through walls is perfect for camping the control points in Hardpoint Domination. Instead, I have to manually look at the loadout each time to make sure it’s what I want.
