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| It is excellent. by Gutsby 09/25/2014, 4:08pm PDT | ||||
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| I made a post about Titanfall back in the day. I was complaining that it didn't seem to have enough "stickiness" - I was having fun, but I didn't know why. It turns out that the reason I wasn't having fun was because I didn't realize it - I was unhooked from the ugly upgrade machine and wondered what the point of it all was. In this regard, Titanfall is like Communism to college grads. The entirety of my reporting on this game should therefore be inferred to be an illusion.
Titanfall doesn't rely much on unlocks. You unlock stuff, but if you play it you'll have everything within a few days. What you'll unlock is never all that interesting - you have a general purpose assault rifle, a shotgun, a couple of SMGs, a DMR, and a pair of sniper rifles. There's also a "smart pistol" - but we'll get back to that later. It's a refreshing kind of game to play these days. It doesn't really care about competetive gameplay or balance in the regular sense. There are no symmetrical spawns - players spec their characters freely - while having the ability to use "Burn Cards", a bunch of single-life consumables that grant you an ability you wouldn't have otherwise. Every battle is framed like an action movie - you arrive in a dropship, accomplish your objectives (or not), and jet out of there. In the thick of it are a bunch of dorky little AI-driven minions that'll shoot you up if you stay in one place too long. Whenever you fire your gun you show up on the minimap, so while you'll have the option to equip a silencer to hide yourself you'll be trading off gunplay with other players. These minions might sound like a nag, but they really play into the main currency of Titanfall: time. When you jump out of the drop ship in Titanfall there's a bunch of seconds on the clock until you can drop your Titan. Kill people, your time until Titanfall drops. Kill AI-minions, your time until Titanfall drops. Your titan is a character-specced bipedal buddy that you can jump into to get a bit heavier in the combat department. It can be equipped with infantry killing machine guns, Titan-wrecking arc cannons, and poisonous clouds of gas. It's a second character in the game, and if you want it to simply provide cover for your wall-running escapades there's no obligation to sit in it. If you do, you'll enjoy better Mech Combat than what the weirdly Halo-esque Hawken managed to offer. There's no need to stick to your Titan. Your character will easily run along walls in beautifully designed levels that allow you to traverse their entirety in seconds if you know what you are doing. Every single triggered ability you can equip is overpowered. You can see through walls, become invisible, or run so fast you can clear a warehouse with a shotgun before you know you are there. Kill times are short - a lot of people complain about this, but this is truly a shooter that focuses on movement, on being in the right place, not the act of putting the crosshair on the other guy. All the weapons - except one - are completely normal. The shotgun kills people up close, the submachine guns do too, but in different ways. You can hang on walls. You can double jump. The assault rifle does everything. The DMR lets you snipe without being a sniper. The snipers snipe while being snipers - one of them kills Titans too. You can board Titans, whether they are friendly or foes. If they are foes, you'll rip off their plating and shoot into their robobrain in real time, triggering a bizarre mind game about their counter. The Smart Gun is the wildcard of the bunch - an excellent early game weapon for Panzer Dragooning AI Minions turns into a lock-on gun that lets you explore wallrunning without having to nail the perfect headshot at the same time. All the guns are simple and have a place in the game - at no point is there a bunch of guns with slightly different features being unlocked. It really is a different kind of shooter, entirely fixated on the idea of making the player feel like some sort of amplifier dropped into an ongoing combat zone, killing people and having fun. It's one of the best multiplayer games I have ever played, and its insane speed makes me get sweaty after a few matches. When you get good at Titanfall, you will end up playing rounds where you do ridiculous things and don't die once. If you don't die once playing Call of Duty, you never did something ridiculous. |
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