Titanfall review : Xbox One

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiyvxRo8DoM

Not just another Call of Duty clone

I've been playing Titanfall for a few weeks now and every time I hear the A.I voice say your titan is ready I still feel a euphoric feeling of joy as I press the d-pad and look upwards to see my 20ft mech fall towards my position like a thunderbolt sent by Zeus himself. Let me say before I go any further that this is not another first person shooter trying to knock Call of duty and battlefield from their perch at the top of the multiplayer food chain, Titanfall blends the best parts of the fps genre with new and exciting game mechanics that makes it, to me at least, the new kid on the block to beat.

Let's start by saying it looks great, I'm playing it on the Xbox one and its right up there with anything else I've seen lately. It runs at a smooth 60fps and I've had no visual problems at all.

Titanfall for those of you who don't know puts you in the shoes of a Titan pilot who is both an elite jet pack equipped soldier and a trained pilot of the games main focus being the Titan mechs. When on foot the pilots have an incredible amount of mobility that makes it a joy to play which in turn has had an effect on the games level design with every map having an amazing amount of verticality to them. You can double jump using the jet pack to reach heights giving you an advantage when it comes to sniping and picking off enemy pilots or A.I controlled grunts that make up the bulk of your enemy force, you can wall run and better yet chain together multiple wall runs in order to get from one end of the map to another in a mere few seconds.

On the other hand after you have waited a short time for your Titan to be built you can call it down and take control of your new shiny walking tank and begin to 'try' and dominate the battlefield, I say try as the thing that I enjoy most about Titanfall is the balance of the match's. There is always a fight that can be won by anyone as each pilot is equipped with an anti-titan weapon as well as their regular load outs which makes a single pilot going up against a 20ft mech seem not so suicidal after all, it's a good feeling when you take out another player big titan with only your wits and a rocket launcher. Not only do you have your anti Titan weapon you can also use your pilots mobility to "rodeo" an enemy Titan to jump on its back and open up your weapon into its vital gears and circuitry to bring it down that way.

When you have your Titan your basically in a walking tank. Depending on your play style you can choose to call down a fast lightly armoured Titan, a big bulking behemoth that is slow but take a hell of lot of damage or a jack of all trades Titan giving you a mix of both speed and strength. Being in your Titan that you have kitted out is enough to give you a major ego boost as you walk around the map shooting both A.I and human controlled enemies full of lead and a rocket here and there. Some of the most interesting points of a match is when you have a Titan vs. Titan fight which depending on your own skill and how you kitted out you titan you'll either come away with joy, reeling that you have just lost 90% of your shiny new Titan health in its first fight or be somewhere 100ft in the sky trying to time your landing after an ejection so you can rodeo and destroy the bastards Titan who just destroyed yours!

Unlike most other multiplayer games Titanfall is solely focused on its excellent 6v6 pvp matches, it cannot be played single player and you are completely at the mercy of Microsoft's dedicated servers apart from a useful but short and easy tutorial mode. There is a feeble attempt to infuse a two sided campaign into the game that you must complete in order to unlock two of the three Titans you can customise and pilot, to be honest I couldn't explain the story to you as the most you get is a voice over from your Commander in the lobby before a match. Playing through and levelling up your pilot brings you new weapons and upgrades based on certain achievements(e.g. getting ten head shots with an assault rifle may unlock a new scope add on to be used with that weapon) but the most interesting thing Titanfall gives you are the burn cards. Burn cards are disposable one use bonuses that may grant you extra damage for a round or the use of an amped up weapon for one round. Some of these cards can drastically change the course of a match like having a titan ready to call at the start of a match a full three minutes before everyone else.

Those are all the good things about Titanfall but by no means is it a perfect game. There is at the moment a severe lack of game modes to play being only 6 which all seem very similar and boring after a while. I always find myself going back to the classic attrition and hard point domination matches. Also the until recently ability to have private matches with friends was a huge disappointment from a game that has such online only focus and business plan. There are also only 15 maps without the 4 additional ones you can get with the recent dlc, those original 15 get old very quickly and worse still while in the lobby the players cannot even vote for which map they play on next. On a personnel level though the lack of visual customizability is annoying, your class of Titan will look exactly the same as another players of the same class apart from weapons chosen. Hopefully the ability to add abit of flair and personnel customisation will come but that's just a visual niggle I have it does not affect the game play at all.

My Verdict

Titanfall is a breath of fresh air in the genre when you look at over saturation of first person shooters there is at the moment, everyone seems to want to jump on the billion dollar call of duty wagon but not make any real changes to the gameplay. Fusing mobility of the pilots with the power of the Titans and keeping the matches to 6v6 has worked incredibly well for Respawn and they have made sure all of these different ideas have come together in a cohesive package that plays like a dream which is why they can be partially forgiven for the bare bones multiplayer experience they are providing, sometimes I suppose you can say less is more and Id recommend this game to any multiplayer and first person shooter gamer out there.

 4.5/5 Stars