Titanfall 2 review

Exceptional

by soulMolecule

Completed as of writing this review: Base Game

(This review is only for the Campaign of the game, since I haven't had the opportunity to play the game with my friends)
I've never played games from Respawn before SWJ: Fallen Order (except for Apex, where I suck) and it's amazing to see how two of their games are this amazing and so polished! Every time I launched this game up, I marathon'ed, strictly until I was tired. That's not common for me in games anymore, so I think this is a good enough compliment. The gameplay is very fast-paced which I like as a boomer-shooter fan but the difficulty felt too easy. Did I really play this bad in tutorial to get a "Hard" difficulty, which is so easy that I got only a small number of deaths? Most of the game I felt like Rambo, headshoting everyone on my way, especially on a Titan. The latter is overkill, since every boss behaved cocky until I blasted them in a minute or two.

The attention to detail is superb, can't complain. The optimization was also fine, apart from sound issues when the game cached itself. The story however, I thought would be a cliché "War is bad, nobody survives" and it was, yeah, but the relationship between the Pilot and it's Titan was the highlight of it. I won't spoil the ending, I'll just say that it teared me up. I can't call this game a masterpiece (I rarely do) but it was an awesome time all around. Definitely pick this one up, even for a full-price! (since I feel bad now after picking it up for dirt-cheap on sale)

If only the third game happened though...

Not sure what I expected from Titanfall 2 - I don't think I even knew that it was an FPS (maybe I thought it was some kind of third-person adventure shooter?) Finding out that it was an FPS, I braced myself for a middling time, but in the end I was really surprised by its excellence - the game exhibits a really elevated understanding of shooter design, never feeling one-note, and it knew just when to vary the mechanics to keep things fresh (the time travel section...! Really good.)

The seamless transition (both in terms of animation and gameplay design/balance) between playing on foot as a wall-running Pilot and piloting the Titan in the cockpit was very impressive - balanced just right to make both feel worthwhile and fun to play, which is not an easy feat at all. The game especially shines in how well-tuned the parkour mechanics are, and how well they mesh with the shooting. The game encourages you to push forward at speed, and when you pull off a good wall-run-slide-headshot combo, I have to say you feel pretty frickin' cool. I would say that some of the Titan loadouts felt a bit same-y or underpowered, and they probably could have cut 3 or 4 of them and made a more distinctive selection. Similarly, the on-foot enemy variety is a bit thin, but I think given the short campaign length that can be forgiven.

The narrative (and a lot of the characterisation) is also pretty slim, but it became clear very quickly that that's not what I was there for - the one shining exception is BT, who easily is the most likeable and memorable character amongst the cornucopia of Titanfall 2's otherwise stale FPS heroes and villains (including your desperately boringly named player character, Jack Cooper). The character and mech designs were great though, and the art direction in general was pretty on-point.

I very much appreciated the tight length - 10hrs for a main campaign which felt like it ended just at the right point (nothing worse than a game which overstays it's welcome, which can be said of a lot of FPSes...) Might just be one of my favourite sci-fi shooters, and the campaign certainly delivers more thrills than some of the Halo games did in their single-player modes...