Preview – Mech fueled mayhem in the Titanfall beta

The Titanfall closed (and then quickly open) beta stress test has sold me on how fantastic this shooter is. Respawn Entertainment has outdone themselves with this one. It lives up to the hype when it comes to frenetic white knuckle action. With three pre-made pilot archetypes and three pre-made titans with three additional customizable slots for each as well as three game modes (is Data sending us a message?), it’s hard to not find a combination that feels fun and exciting to play. It’s an incredible game just so long as you don’t want a single player campaign.

Jet pack assisted wall runs and double jumps. Rad!

Titanfall could most easily be described as CoD meets Hawken, but that still doesn’t do it justice unless you add in some Assassin’s Creed parkour and stealth as well. It’s the love child of dude bros and anime fans’ imaginings of the ultimate game experience. You play as a pilot going into the field to fight on foot or in your massive (let’s say about 15 feet tall) mech to blow the crap out of your opponents. Titans are a commodity to be treated with care, but sometimes it is fun to charge into the thick of things and fight to your doom. The running toward my doom while laughing maniacally part is why I always use the nuclear ejection option. How you play is probably going to depend on what game mode you prefer. I have the most fun in Last Titan Standing myself. It feels far more high stakes when I start in the only titan that I’m getting and there is no respawning. Though I can’t deny that Attrition is the way to go when you just want to run around like a mad man and shoot everything that moves. You get to respawn, so charge into that building and damn the consequences!

On the visual side of things, Titanfall is amazing. From the war ravaged industrial and urban map designs, to the aesthetic choices for the cockpits, down to the utilitarian looks of the pilots, there’s a lot to like about the look of this sci-fi shooter. I was blown away the first time I boarded a titan and watched the smooth transition from first person view as a pilot to the multiscreen cockpit interior. It perfectly preserves the first person experience while making sure that you do feel like your piloting a big, powerful robot.

Helpful alerts let you know when you need to shoot a hitchhiker.

Titanfall overflows with awesome. The battles can go from tactical maneuvers to action that couldn’t be more hectic if it was being described by an over-excited 5 year old. One of my favorite parts of the game is the use of AI controlled minions that fill out the battlefields and make each battle feel like so much more than a 6v6 deathmatch. To add to this, Attrition has a very cinematic evacuation sequence at the end of each match where the losing team has to get to the ship coming to pick them up while the victors are tasked with either killing the remaining enemy pilots or just blowing up their evac shuttle. Then there’s the helpful (though I often yelled at it) advice that pipes into the titan to let me know that I’ve taken severe damage, or that an enemy has jumped on me, or even that (and yes, I figured this out on my own) I’m outnumbered 3 to 1.

Burn cards are the things that intrigue me most and also make me worry about future monetization of Titanfall. They’re one time use power ups (special weapon, reduced cooldown toward the next titan, active radar pinging, etc) that last until I inevitably get turned to paste. You get to have up to three active slots for them (i.e. you may burn up to three over the course of one battle) and you  keep the rest in reserve for another battle. The gamble is that they need to be activated before spawning and I have a horrible habit of walking out of a door and getting stepped on. Sometimes the game really does make me feel curiously like a bowl of petunias. “Oh no, not again.”

Learn from your gruesome demise. Pro tip: standing in the open is bad.

Here’s where I want to sidetrack just a bit and broach the ever popular console versus PC debate. I’ve been playing both versions and it’s clear to me that if you have a gaming PC, that’s the way to go. Texture quality is better, anti aliasing is a huge bonus, and particle effects are much improved over the Xbox One version. And that’s all ignoring my happily admitted bias of preferring keyboard and mouse to game pads. Of course, if you don’t have the power to run everything at max settings at 60 fps, you may want to go with the guaranteed level of quality offered by a console.

Even though Titanfall is possibly the best multiplayer FPS that I’ve had the opportunity to play in a long time, I find it personally disappointing that it lacks a single player campaign. It’s inevitable that six person teams are going to start organizing and without a matchmaking service, casual players that just want to have fun in the amazing game environment are going to get crushed. Not to mention the general vitriolic hate spewed by people when they get to hide behind screen names like 4ssr3aper. That’s just not going to be fun for players that drop in when they get a chance. It seems like a travesty to pay $60 to get that kind of experience from a game with so much potential. It’s truly a shame, because there are few gaming experiences quite as satisfying as using my titan’s melee attack to tear an enemy pilot from his doomed titan, crush him, and then toss his corpse aside. Titanfall hits PC and Xbox One consoles on March 11th.