Note: this review only covers the game’s single-player campaign.
Titanfall 2 is the 2016 sequel to Titanfall, developed by Respawn Entertainment. While the original attempted a fusion between multi- and single-player, this time around the sequel does have a proper single-player campaign. In an intergalactic sci-fi setting, you play as soldier Jack Cooper, who as a member of a militia group fights the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation for planetary control. After witnessing the death of his superior on the battlefield, Jack becomes the pilot of his Titan, a huge mecha that enhances the pilot’s fighting ability greatly. Now on their own, the newly made pilot and his Titan have to uphold the previously assigned mission.
I’m quite sceptical of Modern Military Shooters (MMS). With Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s commercial success, the cinematic, spectacle-focused storytelling approach in shooters took the industry by storm. The approach itself isn’t inherently bad, but in this case, what it mostly resulted in is a bunch of formulaic uninspired copycats.
While Titanfall 2 doesn’t outright reject this story-telling approach, it seems to treat its story more as a means to an end. That end being fun gameplay. The story primarily serves as the vehicle to logically connect the locations and events that you see throughout the game, and that’s it. While I do think that MMSs took it too far with scripted story sequences every few minutes, the pendulum doesn’t need to swing back the entire way either. I’m not advocating for games to return to the days of Quake or anything. What is unfortunate however is when games seemingly put their story first and the gameplay into a subordinate position. So I’m quite happy with Titanfall 2, which finds a much better balance for story and gameplay than anything else in the genre that I have played.
As a base for its gameplay, Titanfall 2 takes the CoD embossed MMS core with extended movement capabilities. Your character can double jump and run along walls for a short amount of time. By chaining your wall runs, you can pass through a corridor, without ever hitting the ground. For weapons, the game adopts the MMS script fully—you get all your familiar weapon types: automatic rifles (some with burst fire), shotguns, sniper rifles, grenades, and rocket launchers. TF2 adds some futuristic quirks to most weapons, but they don’t deviate from the MMS norm in regards to how they feel to play.
The game features automatically regenerating health, which is another popular design choice for an MMS. This is something that I generally don’t like. It encourages playing defensively—you sitting in cover, occasionally raising your head to shoot for a bit, until you are hit badly and you return back to cover, only to continue the routine once your health has replenished again until all the enemies are dead. Luckily it’s much better here. Health regeneration is quick, and since the game puts an emphasis on movement, it is generally a better idea to just dodge your opponent’s firing than to cower away. This results in a pretty energetic gameplay loop, though whenever a level converges into a corridor, you will probably have to resort to sticking to cover if you don’t want to die.
The fast gameplay has a downside, however. It makes the overall combat situation less legible, and with enemies that can basically hold all the weapons you could, it’s hard to make out which enemies pose a threat to you in what way. Add to that a messy combat situation overall, with enemies shooting at you from all angles, dying in this game without understanding how it happened is not an uncommon occurrence. Generally, I’ve died like this about once every mission. Fortunately, the game sets checkpoints quite often, so whenever that happens you won’t lose a ton of progress. It’s still frustrating when it happens though.
So far I’ve only described how the pilot feels to play, but there is another major component to this game as the title implies: the titan. It helps you out whenever you are running around as a pilot, shooting at your enemies the same as you. But you also have the opportunity to manoeuvre the titan yourself, by boarding the mecha. This fundamentally changes the rules of the game.
The titan is immune against light fire from infantry troops and can only be matched by other robots/titans. Fighting these kinds of enemies is what the titan will mostly be used for. The titan features a hybrid health system, with an automatically regenerating shield and after that a fixed health system, where health can only be replenished by picking up power cells that are spread across the level.
Movement within the titan feels heavy. Your movement is greatly restricted and except for being able to unlock a temporary flying ability, you are bound to the ground walking. It creates a nice contrast with the movement heavy pilot.
Your titan can freely equip different loadouts once unlocked. Loadouts feature different main weapons and secondary abilities that you can use. This allows for a lot of variety in how you can approach combat in the game, with each loadout feeling distinct. It keeps gameplay within the titan fresh, despite the stiff manoeuvring.
The game is structured into self-contained levels, each one trying something different. At the start of the game, you get introduced to the core mechanics and controls. Once those are mastered, during the middle section, the game remixes its gameplay in small ways to keep your attention. Then, towards the end, the game steers more towards spectacle where you get to fight some big battles with breathtaking scenery.
TF2 starts somewhat slower than I would like it to but takes up the pace after about half an hour. Levels are generally shaped after their purpose, being small and simple when movement is the focus and spacious and multi-levelled for combat arenas, which allows you to employ your movement abilities to cleverly outflank the enemy. In-between those sections, sometimes you can chat with your titan, giving you more insight into your environment, or reminding you of what you have to do. The writers certainly try to emotionally bind you to it, which is a tough ask, considering it’s a machine. And while the attempts at adding charm to the robot, by having it interpret figures of speech literally, are quite old and played out, they still make it work. This type of game doesn’t need a lot of emotional involvement to work, but the game fosters enough for the titan, that key scenes in the game produce a good sense of involvement.
But again, you don’t just run around as the pilot. Sometimes during a mission, you are advised to enter your titan and some missions are played exclusively within it. Whenever such a section comes around, the game gives you a new loadout to play with, to keep things fresh.
In titan form, you will fight multiple boss fights against other titan pilots throughout the game. And to my surprise, they are quite good. Boss fights are not a thing you often see in MMS games, and for good reason: the gameplay usually doesn’t lend itself well to a sustained fight. Those games that have tried this in defiance, have rarely been good in these sections. The way TF2 makes them work is by having these battles exclusively in titan form. Having slower fights in an environment where things are already moving slower than just as the pilot—it just feels natural. Another factor that helps is that the fights don’t last too long. Your titan does very visible damage to the enemy titan and it’s usually over after about a minute. This makes these boss fights just another form of added variety to the gameplay, instead of an occasional annoyance.
The levels that stand out the most by a wide margin are all located in the middle section of the game. After having mastered the core mechanics of the game during the beginning, the player is provided with new gameplay components that mix things up in each level. The first is a giant assembly line with many moving parts that challenge your acquired parkour skills. After that follows a level with two separate timelines that you seamlessly travel between, and for the second part of the level, you get to control the time at the press of a button. This makes for excellent new movement challenges and combat moments, as you travel from one battlefield to the other across time within the blink of an eye. The final level in this outstanding middle section gives you a tool to manipulate machinery in your environment. This gives you the power to make obstacles disappear, walls and platforms appear, and convert enemy robots to your side—again, at the press of a button. What makes these levels so memorable is that they remix the core gameplay in pretty significant and fun ways and being contained to just one level, they never overstay their welcome. Another thing in their favour is that each level is very visually distinct: going from big machinery, to an overgrown abandoned facility, to the top of a mountain range. It’s a bit of a shame that after that the game goes more with the genre typical spectacle of big and impressive looking battles, but that doesn’t mean the end of the game is bad by any means. The game still has all of its good core mechanics to fall back onto.
In conclusion, Titanfall 2 is a good game. It has good, sometimes excellent, gameplay and level design. The story on the other hand is mostly forgettable, doesn’t say anything beyond the typical sci-fi tropes, and serves more as a means to an end.
What makes the game stand out, is that the genre it emerged from is largely a sea of mediocrity and sameness. Titanfall 2 manages to establish an identity all of its own, and while doing so gave us one of the best Modern Military Shooters of the last decade.
In summary: 7/10
