Titanfall (2014)

It's not the most fun I've ever had playing an FPS, but Titanfall is really polished and well made. It could use some more guns to unlock, but I guess they might be saving that for DLC. It's hard to tell how much I like this, really, because I'm the only one I know with an Xbox One. My friends didn't get it, so it's not like back in the day when we were all in party playing Modern Warfare. Still, having a good enough time to play Titanfall to max level and reset it once. Their version of COD's "prestige" is "generations."

This is it guys and gals, here we go! This is when it all starts for real. November was exciting and all, having two brand new consoles launch, but the real main event comes in March when all the great games start coming out. Great games like South Park: The Stick of Truth, and Dark Souls II. Yesiree, the next gen has now become the current gen.

What? South Park and Dark Souls aren’t coming out on the new consoles? Well one out of three ain’t bad, so let’s pin all of our unrealistic hopes and expectations on Titanfall for the time being, shall we? Thrust into the role as the potential savior of the Xbox One, Titanfall will eventually get released on the 360 as well. As usual though, I’ll be taking my game to the PC. Don’t worry PS4 users, you may not get Titanfall, but you get exclusive use of InFamous: Second Son, and that looks pretty awesome.


Not “Robots and Jetpacks” awesome, but awesome nonetheless.

Full disclosure, I’m typically not a fan of first person shooters, and I pretty much never play competitive online shooters. Titanfall is both of those things, so I’m flying in relatively uncharted and unliked territory. There are TONS of online shooter enthusiasts out there who will tell you all about their feelings on Titanfall, but if you’re like me and online FPS games aren’t really your thing, hopefully I can help you out.

Titanfall is fun. I can (and will) get into all kinds of details about what is and isn’t good about this game, but the most important question of any game is always “Is it fun?”. Titanfall is indeed fun, even for an inexperienced player like me. In fact, it’s fun ESPECIALLY for an inexperienced player like me. To explain why I’m having fun let me explain why I don’t like online FPS games. First, I don’t love first-person games because I prefer my character to have personality and/or customization. I’m not a big fan of the silent protagonist. I prefer my Shepherds, Drakes, and Ezios. In RPGs, I like to see the upgrades I’m putting on my character. I like the spacial awareness 3rd person provides. I feel shuttered in 1st person. It’s bizarre, but I probably would have liked Borderlands and FarCry 3 infinitely better if they just pulled the camera back 10 feet.

The second hurdle to online competitive FPS games is the “competitive” part. I do enjoy the occasional competitive game. I PVPed in WoW. I play DOTA. In my mind, there’s one major difference to those games, survivability. In those games when I am attacked I always feel like I have a brief window of response time. If someone gets the jump on me I’ll at least have a chance to attack back or retreat. In FPS games it’s often a matter of who saw who first. There are some deaths in these games that I am confident there was nothing I could have done to prevent. Sometimes I even feel sorry for the ones I kill. I ran full speed into a room at the exact same time as an enemy and my crosshair just happened to already be positioned right on him. He didn’t have a chance. It wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t to my merit.

Luckily Titanfall has answers to both the FPS lack of personality and online shooter insta-death problems. Those two answers are both actually the same answer, and that answer is Titans and Jetpacks. Jetpacks and Titans. Jetpacking onto Titans. Titans stomping on Jetpackers.


Titans WITH Jetpacks!

I have naturally gravitated towards Titan use in my time playing. You have a shield and a boost and, most importantly, you can take a few hits before going down. You also get directional notifications when enemies are locking on to your Titan, allowing for a chance at retaliation or retreat. This all helps alleviate the insta-death frustration I am prone to. While not in my Titan I take full advantage of the Jetpacks and parkour mechanics. This makes me feel like I have a fighting chance of evading an attack, or at least causing the enemy to use great skill to pick me out of the air. I’m even managing to get by with relative success while committing the Cardinal Sin, using a controller for a competitive PC shooter. There are definitely times when I can tell an enemy got the best of me because their keyboard and mouse controls let them aim quickly and more precisely than I could, but for the most part I’m hanging in there. As an inexperienced shooter player that’s all I want, an honest shot at success.

The lack of personality often encountered in FPS games is still somewhat present, especially with the relatively weak campaign, which is just 10 or so multiplayer matches with some voice-overs during the action. It’s actually almost impossible to keep up with the story while you’re running around fighting against other players. Personally, I found the most personality came from the Titans. Calling down a Titan Drop and having this magnificent robotic beast blast from the sky like a meteor is just fantastic. It feel so good wall-running and jetpacking over towards it, then having your Titan reach out, pluck you straight out of the air, toss you into its chest cavity, and off you go!


“Hey buddy! Wanna go blow stuff up?” Who’s going to say “no” to that?

The campaign is pretty bare, and the game modes for the time being seem like your basic 3-4 standard FPS modes. The upgrade system isn’t the least bit ground-breaking either. The game looks great, but not progressively so. The online FPS-ness of Titanfall still makes me only want to play for an hour or so at a time. By the numbers, this isn’t a game that should appeal to me very much.

It does though, because it’s fun, and that’s by far the most important factor.