Titanfall has all the mainstays of modern shooter convention: fast-paced gameplay, customizable loadouts, a two-weapon swap system, a host of different game types, a leveling system that locks newer players out of a host of "earned" options, arbitrary points awarded when players happen to perform a task in the game from holding a point, to killing an enemy, to calling in their Titan. Everything you want (or don't) is on display. And this is just the beta. Respawn made a point of reminding testers that the beta is a limited version of what the full game would be like and that the point of allowing them to test the game was to sniff out bugs and stress test servers.
All that said, I still had a blast with Titanfall.
The game plays out like this; Each team has 6 players cast in the role of Pilots, skilled soldiers trained in the art of driving the game's titular Titan mechs. The battlefield is then also populated by swarms of various AI controlled infantry who lack the health, aiming skill, and intelligence of player-controlled pilots.
Titanfall is a game that tries to balance speed and maneuverability with brute strength and endurance, and for the most part, it does a pretty good job. Pilots are nimble, and can be upgraded with an activated skill that will increase their movement speed and healing, or a timed personal cloaking field for that stealth edge. Pilots are loaded up with 3 different weapons: a primary (rifle, shotgun, etc.), sidearm (some kind of pistol), and anti-Titan (a rocket of some sort), as well as grenades. Equipped with what the game dubs "jump-packs" Pilots are given the ability to double-jump and wallrun, which allows them to move quickly through tight spaces and reach rooftops from which they can snipe or mount Titans. When mounting friendly Titans, Pilots can provide support fire from their backs to target enemy pilots or open fire on enemy Titans. Be careful though! Just because you're attached to a Titan doesn't mean it's protecting you. Stray missiles or bullets from the gargantuan mechs will take out a Pilot easy. When a Pilot mounts an enemy Titan, they tear panels off and expose some of the more important systems of the bot. They can then open fire and cause a great deal of damage. This skill is important because the mounted Titan has no way of removing the player. Pilots must disembark from their Titan to deal with what is known as a "rodeo" so that their war-machine isn't victim to constant damage.
On to the Titans! When the game commences, Pilots have a 3-minute wait time on the delivery of their Titan. Killing enemy AIs and Pilots (and capturing hardpoints in the Hardpoint game type) takes seconds off your clock, allowing you to deploy your mech of mass devastation quicker. Once the clock hits zero, you can call in your Titan at any time, even post-death. Nothing will cause the clock to reset, until your Titan is destroyed. In fact, dying is occasionally kind of nice, because while dead, you can select to respawn already inside your Titan, and not have to wait on foot, vulnerable to the enemy, while your giant robot falls from the sky.
Instead of the 3-weapon loadout that comes with being a Pilot, Titans have just the one, and who can blame them? Carrying around three different guns on a giant robot seems a little unreasonable. Instead Titans have a pair of abilities that work out nicely. First is the ordnance, which the tutorial would have you believe is a good way to keep yourself covered while reloading your enormous assault rifle. They also get an activated ability. The beta allowed you to test out the Vortex Shield and Electric Smoke. While the latter is pretty much what it sounds like, the Vortex Shield allows a Titan to pretty much halt all incoming projectiles while active (think Neo in Matrix Reloaded). When the button is released, all these bullets and rockets and grenades will then be launched directly back at wherever you've aimed them. It give Titan-on-Titan combat a little bit more depth than "shoot the other guy until he dies", especially when both players have the Vortex Shield equipped. While on-board the Titan, you have a "damage core" that will increase your damage output on a similar clock to awaiting Titanfall. You are also completely unable to jump while inside your Titan and are instead given a dash. The number of times you can dash and how quickly your meter fills up are dependent on which chassis you're piloting.
Adding to the list of differences between Titans and Pilots are their shields. Titans don't take damage right away. Their regenerating shields will soak up the first couple blows before actual hull integrity is compromised. Once shields are dropped, however, Titans will have glowy red spots on them that indicate critical areas where additional damage can be dealt. The last thing about the Titans worth mentioning is their "Doomed" state. When a Titan looses all of its hull integrity, it enters a Doomed state, where a red bar will tick away how long a Pilot has to eject before the Titan explodes with them inside. A few interesting things about Doomed Titans are: additional damage will shorten the amount of time a Titan stays doomed before detonating, there is a Titan perk that allows the Titan to go nuclear and deal a significant amount of damage to nearby enemies when it detonates, and that there is a different perk that will automatically eject a Pilot and cloak them upon entering Doomed state, even if the Pilot does not have cloak as their activated skill.
Another important mechanic worth mentioning is the Burn Card system. Once a Pilot reaches level 7, they begin to unlock Burn Cards, which are single-use, until-death/match-end perks that can be utilized to great effect. Things such as improved weapons, faster movement, and even reduced time to Titanfall were among a few that I was able to play around with. These cards can drastically effect gameplay and should be used strategically, because once burned, the card is done. By level 11, players could equip a total of 3 burn cards to be used, one at a time, at the beginning of the match or before respawn.
The match types made available in the beta were Attrition (deathmatch) and Hardpoint (capture-point). Oddly, while I immediately gravitated to Attrition for my first couple matches, I found that Hardpoint games tended to last longer and be more intense. Occasionally one team would be more imbalanced, have better burn cards, or have higher level players and just win by an insurmountable margin. However, more often than not, games came down to a difference of 10-20 points between teams. A couple times I had thought that my team had won, only to be given the epilogue objective of reaching the evacuation shuttle due to failure.
While all this might sound mind-blowingly awesome (because, let's face it, giant fucking robots), Titanfall's beta did have its short-comings. For starters, the options menu. Most things with various levels of adjustment (sound, sensitivity, FOV) were put on sliders without a numeric value. This is pretty much bullshit and makes it impossible to tell how I need to adjust my FOV or sensitivity. Hopefully, Respawn understands this and it gets patched out of the release version. Second, menus and title/idle screens. When you first launch Titanfall, the game brings you to a title screen with the Play, Options and Quit choices. Once clicking play, you are taken to a second idle screen where you can adjust loadouts, look at and equip burn cards, adjust options, and, oh yeah, play the game. Once the game finds you a suitable match, it can drop you into a game in progress but will, more often than not, insert you into a lobby, where you have all the same choices as in the previous menu and a countdown until the match starts. What is also bothersome about how unnecessarily cumbersome they've made it to get into a match, is the fact that after the first title screen, many options for resolution, buffering, anti-aliasing are unavailable. Even if the game needed to be restarted for these changes to take effect, it would be nice to have the option of adjusting them for correction on relaunch. Finally, I will not be purchasing Titanfall on launch because no matter how hard they stress test their servers, there is no feasible way that they are prepared for the amount of traffic they'll be receiving on launch day. I have done this once in my life with Diablo III, and after the Error 37 clusterfuckery, I refuse to participate in the same bullshit again. EA has also been guilty of doing this in the past with SimCity. Just no. Not by any means a day one purchase for me.
Having said all that I have to end with this. In a nutshell, Titanfall was an incredibly enjoyable experience. Respawn had me hooked with giant robot shooter, but finally getting to try out the beta confirmed my enthusiasm for this game. Despite the modern military shooter conventions that have been all but shoe-horned in out of "necessity", Titanfall manages to force its way out from the crowd. With giant mechanical limbs.
- Nik "Latency" Trumble
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