Titanfall 2

Words cannot describe how much I love this game. The movement is super satisfying and quick, the gunplay is exquisite, and the map design in both the campaign and multiplayer is perfectly designed for the high-octane combat. The campaign, while short, is excellent. The story does not have a single bad moment. The characters are very well written, especially your Titan companion, BT-7274; over the course of the campaign you grow to love him more and more. I have beaten the campaign four times, once on normal difficulty, twice on hard, and once on master, and when this game gets difficult, it gets brutally difficult. Despite this, nothing feels unfair and it's almost always your fault when you die. The multiplayer is currently broken thanks to Respawn's negligence, but installing the Northstar mod allows you to play on community hosted servers.

Overall, this game is excellent and I recommend that everyone tries it out.

My favorite game of all time. The gameplay is impeccable. I have more hours playing Titanfall 2 multiplayer than probably any other game. There is nothing finer in life than listening to music and playing Titanfall in PSVR. I have more hours outside of PSVR, but I've probably played at least 100 hours in.

Best Game I've Ever Played

Titanfall 2 is a pretty good video game. I'm not going to be talking much about the single player campaign, although I will say I thought it was good, but not great. No, in this review I'll be focusing on the multiplayer and the mechanics of the game.

The Movement
I love games with fluid movement. And this game has some of the best easy to learn hard to master movement I've ever seen. The basic ways to traverse are walking ( very bad), running (pretty bad), wall running (a step in the right direction) and sliding (the cream of the crop). While wall running, you move much faster than while running on the ground, making it preferable in basically every situation. And while sliding, you will start to lose speed eventually, but by landing on the ground while crouched to slide, and quickly jumping, you maintain most (if not all) of your speed. This technique called slide hopping is really the main reason the movement is so fun in this game, because you can be very simple with your slide hopping, or you can start to incorporate air strafes and tap strafes to effectively turn while moving like this, allowing you to keep your speed and zoom across the map.

Hands down my favorite way to gain speed in this game is with the grappling hook. By grappling a high up target a long distance a way and moving your camera in such a way (it's difficult to explain exactly but not too hard to do) you can slingshot yourself at massive speeds. Combine this with slide hopping and you can very often get to the opposite side of the map in 5 or 10 seconds.

The Shooting
With players zooming about, shooting is probably fairly difficult, right? Well, yes, depending on your gun. Some guns are easier to use than others. The CAR is considered very point and click and gets a lot of flac from the community for how easy to use it is. My personal favorite gun, the kraber, is a sniper that fires a projectile that instantly kills a player it hits. If you miss you generally die due to its long reloading time and the fact that it makes a very loud sound and leave a bullet trail, but it feels so good to hit cool kraber shots that I use it almost all the time. Weapon variety isn't too bad in this game, as seen we have some smg's like the CAR and the alternator which, while technically different, are mostly the same. There are some explosive weapons like the softball and the cold way which are really unique. But frankly, the weapons are mostly just point and shoot, and with some of them you need to lead your target. But I think the best part of titanfalls shooting is that it works while you're flying through the air at mach 2. I've rarely felt cheated out of kills nor have I felt that my opponent got a wacky kill from something related to netcode, which is impressive in such a fast paced game.

The Melee
Remember when I said this game had pretty good netcode? Yea that was a lie. Melee is the dumbest thing in this game. It can feel like a lottery of whoever presses f when the game liked them better. Very often your melee will connect on the other player, but you will still die anyway (melee is one hit kill). But personally, while it is a bit of a lottery sometimes, generally the player moving faster or melee-ing first will win.

Executions
We've gotten to my favorite mechanic in the game, and quite probably the only reason I have so many hours in it. The Execution, the ultimate disrespect. When you melee the backsied of a grounded, uncrouched opponent, and hold the melee button instead of just tapping it, you will go into an animation where your character kills the opponent, generally in an entertaining or disrespectful manner. I love this mechanic because the situation where one can be executed is exactly what you shouldn't be doing in titanfall. Titanfall is about being airborne, wall borne, or sliding on the ground. All of these states are safe from executions. But running around like it's call of duty? Or worse, standing! This is what I live for, dropping down on one of these players and holding f like I've never held f before. A friend and I have spent hours upon hours in private matches trying to execute each other, just for the glory of it all.

Servers
Obligatory servers don't work section. And yea, the default Respawn servers very often do not work, and you will get booted from them very quickly. But nowadays, we have the Northstar client. And the world lives in harmony.

Overall
Definitely one of my favorite shooter games, if a game can be fun while you're just in a solo match practicing your movement, then in my opinion, that game is good.

I only played the single-player campaign, but it was pretty good! The shooting was good, the wall-jumping was good, and I liked BT.

The first Titanfall was just a multiplayer deathmatch type shooter, so I jumped into the second one because of the campaign mode. The campaign is a standard call of duty style linear missions, but with a twist - very fluid and enjoyably fun parkour style platform jumping, and mech combat.

The bulk of the game has you going through linear levels platforming, running across walls, jumping in low gravity, climbing, to reach new areas. The combat feels pretty great in terms of impact, but I have one big personal problem. I never was a fan of fantastical scifi future type stuff , and here the aesthetic isn't very appealing to me. The guns don't particularly look appealing to me, so I never really enjoyed using them or really cared which one I had. I just picked up whatever gun and ran through the campaign. They're all extremely bulky looking like giant slabs of metal and overly futuristic. It's a personal taste thing for me I guess. it's just not my style. The writing/story is completely drab, boring, and generic. I did not give a single shit about the story here. Just a means to an end. You have a 'buddy buddy' mech that talks to you the whole game, and its kind of cool for a sidekick type perspective, but at times a little bit corny.

So while the boots on ground, parkour, run and gun combat is pretty damn fun, very fluid and enjoyable, well the other half of the time you're inside a mech doing mech combat. And these segments I personally didn't really enjoy too much. Was more like a chore everytime I was forced into a mech. As expected, you move extremely slow, your field of view is incredibly cramped and tight, and everything turns into slow methodical corner peeking extreme explosion / minigun shooting. It's not really boring, but for me its more the setting of the whole thing. If I'm not into the setting or premise, then its hard to really get into the gameplay. These mech segments happen about every second level and while there are some pretty cool boss fights that get thrown in, it's still the weakest point of the game for me. But again, the boss fights mostly turn into hiding behind a piece of wall, peeking out and shooting off some rockets, repeat or run for a health pickup.

The level variety is decent, some levels are big industrial factories, others are jumping across flying ships in the sky, some outdoor segments where your wallrunning across cliffs and things like that. Its standard really. There's one level with a 'time travel' device that I thought was pretty boring and gimmicky but it didn't last too long thankfully. The enemies are either squishy human military guys that are the most fun to fight because of the mist of blood that pop out from them, or you have various types of robots/mechs, or fucking dinosaurs??? I never understood why the hell theres dinosaurs in the game but OK.

Really for most people Titanfall 2 would be enjoyable if they are into the whole mech scifi futuristic military shooter, but for me It's just not an aesthetic I personally enjoy too much, and thats the main thing that hindered my enjoyment. I can't comment on the multiplayer, this review is not about that. Just the campaign. I played on second hardest difficulty called 'Hard' and I will note that the challenge was just right. When I died it was mostly my fault, and overcoming a tough checkpoint felt rewarding.

6.5/10