Fresh off our Titanfall hands-on at the Xbox One booth, Will and I are sitting in the PAX Prime media room trying to gather my thoughts. All I (Charles) can think about is how fun, fast-paced, and adrenaline-pumped Titanfall was. After choosing my soldier, and titan, we hopped into a LAN session, and from the minute we spawned shit was going down.
Titanfall actually offers more than your standard first-person shooter fare, an overlay of sorts on a bed of a simplistic system. The added soldier and mech play systems are easy to grasp, most likely hard to master, but fun all the while.
The strengths of Titanfall revolved around the game’s flow. The dichotomy between soldier play, and mech play, was pronounced and each was unique. While playing as a soldier, players were extremely mobile, able to climb walls and easily climb atop perches and maneuver through buildings. The downsides? They were also extremely fragile. Titanfall expects soldiers to die extremely quickly, which was actually extremely gratifying. If you snuck up on someone, you got a kill. It didn’t take an entire clip of bullets to bring them down. Mechs however, were a different story all together. Sacrificing speed for power, Mechs could lay waste to entire groups of soldiers with their improved weapons (or simply run them over). Fighting Mech vs Mech however turned into a sustained slugfest. The ability to combine two gameplay styles that were each so different from one another is a testament to the quality of the game’s design.
One of the most exciting parts of Titanfall is actually the end, where after all the killing is done the losing team gets a chance to escape onto a ship, and the winning team is tasked to stop them. Will and I were, of course, on the winning team, so after we won we began trying to stop the losers from embarking their ship, a fun little post-game of sorts. Killing anyone on the losing team grants a wealth of XP.
Titanfall is an incredibly-polished game, and if it’s not on your radar it should be, regardless of whether you like FPS’s or not. Respawn has brought an excellent FPS to the table, one that threatens the dominance of Call of Duty while being the farthest thing from a clone.
