Your Titan is standing by...

First Person Shooter’s and I have a love-hate relationship. I love them when I first get them….until I log in and get headshot 14 times in a row before getting my bearings. Then I hate them. I’ve never devoted the time to them over the years to learn the ins and outs of the game-play style.
Once or twice a year I get a strong urge to play an FPS so I tend to keep my eyes on their market. Most recently I came across Titanfall (Respawn Entertainment) just before it launched. For those of you who were living under a rock a few months ago or missed the massive advertising campaign leading up to the launch in some other way, Titanfall is a futuristic shooter based around a few major concepts:

The first is the games namesake, the Titans. You play as a pilot who, when the timer has counted down, can call in a titan with which to wreak bloody havoc.

The second is the movement system when not piloting a titan. It combines a free-flow movement inspired by parkour added to futuristic technologies to amp this to a new level. These technologies include a jet pack to allow higher and double jumps and remove fall damage and magnetic boots to allow epic wall run times and various other physics stretching feats.

The maps only allow 6 vs. 6, but the third concept helps keep the maps far from feeling empty, Minions. I have read a lot of complaints about the minions; basic soldiers that roam the battlefield taking pot-shots at pilots and otherwise acting like gnats. The most common complaint I see is that they are nothing but point farming. I disagree. Yes, I have been known to use them as a good way to build some fast points in a match that is not quite going our way, but I still find the most fun in hunting down other players. I find minions to be the flesh to a game that already has great bones to build on. They make the combat feel like a war rather than a gladiatorial arena. They appear in small squads, move as units and make you feel like you are an elite unit instead of just another soldier.

The main thing that I love about the minions is how they impressively up the sociopathic enjoyment factor. Some of the most satisfying moments in game come when a pod of 8 grunts drop right in front of you. Even in the mode where these kills can matter the most, Attrition, they do very little. Each minion nets one point, where each pilot nets you four and each titan five. If murdered enough en masse it could be an effective tool to turn the tide from a loss to a win in a close match, but in my experience the minions rarely spawn densely enough to be truly abused.

However, what keeps me logging back into this game long after having reached level 50 is the fluidity of motion. Where many games in the past have acheived a movement system in which you can move around a map as you would in real life, I feel Titanfall, out of the games I have played, marks the highest point in this development. When I logged in for the first time the ability to seamlessly move over and around things with little effort, to transition from running along a street to on a wall to on a roof and over, immediately brought a smile to my face.

I could go on and on with my love of this game, but when it comes down to it, it’s simply an extremely well-made, detail oriented shooter.

Honestly, the number of amazingly fun matches I experience far outweigh the few gripes, but they still merit a mention.

First the SMG; specifically the CAR SMG. I am fine with the rate of fire, and therefore the damage it can deal in a short period of time. It makes sense to have a small machine gun be able to take you out fast. But not from across a rooftop or street. The range is far too long, making it a run-n-gun weapon of choice, barely needing to aim regardless of distance.

Next, the shotgun. Again, it should be devastating. After all it’s a shotgun clearly designed for war with a spray that makes up close aiming needless. But once again, the deadly range on this weapon is too much. If you are caught in its spray even from across a large room most of your health is gone, if you aren’t flat out dead.

Third, a titan defense weapon has recently crept into my list of dread. The electric smoke, which is exactly what it sounds like, can take another titan down through shields and all its health before it fades, even the highly armored Ogres. It was originally implemented, from initial descriptions, as an effective way of removing rodeo-ing pilots from your titan. It was fairly effective at this, but the pilot could still get a good amount of damage in before it would kill them. So they upped the damage…to everything, and now it is basically a kill switch for everything in range.

The last weapon, the one that I have the largest problem with, is a player’s foot. Two melee animations exist. If you get behind a player or grunt and hit melee, you snap their neck, instant kill. Awesome. I fully approve. However, if you catch them facing you, you jump kick them…also an instant kill. Not awesome, cheap. This leads to bunny hopping idiots spamming the melee button, getting that one lucky strike in to end the fight before you can catch them with enough bullets to down them. Either damage on the jump kick needs to drop significantly in order to balance it, requiring at minimum two kicks to successfully kill someone, or they need to add an ability to counter the melee attack, a la Battlefield 4.

Overall, I feel Titanfall has achieved a lasting status as one of the best. It has introduced some fun new mechanics into the genre, and tweaked old faithful mechanics to fit its needs. I look forward to new DLC as it comes, and to see what Respawn has in store for us in Titanfall 2, already confirmed as in development.

Sociopathic Score: 

This game fully enables your genocidal, war criminal tendencies with the plethora of soulless grunts to mass murder, without making you feel like too awful of a person for indulging.

Sophomoric Score: 

No poo jokes, cartoons or kid humor here…

Strategic Score: 

It’s a shooter, so a lot of strategies are pretty well established, but the Titans add a nice twist to the old, creating the need for creative thinking to overcome a full team of titans.

-Mac

Titanfall is available for XBOX One, XBOX 360 and PC: