Titanfall 2
There is cover in Titanfall 2s campaign, but you wont use it, except during brief, gloriously fluid slides behind crates and fences in order to swiftly reload and recover, before throwing yourself furiously back into the fray without stopping. There are grenades in Titanfall 2, but you wont lob them sheepishly from afar as a cheap way of thinning out the crowd before moving in. Youll hurl them and give immediate chase to multiply the pressure, or drop them directly at the feet of the enemy, before leaping ten feet into the air, bouncing off a wall, and spinning back around to rain down bullets on any staggered survivors.
Titanfall 2s level design often has the grammar of more traditional FPS, but the language used to travel between each piece of punctuation is entirely new. Its campaign is built of familiar, concrete forms, but the total, creative freedom afforded by its free-running, double-jumping traversal systems reshapes everything you know about firing angles, terrain, cover, attack, and defense. This isnt simply an FPS highlighted with isolated sections of Mirrors Edge-style platforming, as it could have been. This is a game in which the entire fabric of everything you do, in combat, in navigation, in environmental puzzling, and in the many seamless, hybrid sections that blend two or all of the above, is powered entirely by the unprecedented, truly three-dimensional movement Titanfall 2 affords you. And you will always be moving.
Your Titan will be a permanent presence, wingman, and buddy, as well as your primary means of travelling the campaigns world(s). But hes only intermittently playable in combat, your time cut between on-foot battles and mech vs. mech play, as the two of you work together to explore and solve the problems around you, two differently sized and equipped partners sharing a common goal. Titanfall 2 does a great job of changing up pace and environment in order to justify your going it alone and joining back up, but its handling of BT impresses beyond the purely structural.
The new, unlockable pilot abilities are chief among these, an expanded part of your characters load-out which open up the scope to retune Titanfall 2s combat in a vast number of different directions. If you want to amp up the kinetic, aerial game, then equip the grappling hook and use your barrelling acrobatic momentum to become a gun-slinging Spider-Man, launching from wall-run, to double-jump, to swing, to yet another soaring leap. Or snag your opponents and zip in for a quick melee execution.
The use of Titans has evolved, with personal mech-friends now available in all of the campaigns strategically diverse flavours. What this leads to in practice is a much more nuanced, robot-vs.-robot game, where individual strengths and weaknesses make a huge difference to match-ups, demanding an almost fighting-game-style appraisal of risks and advantages when engaging an enemy player.
Titanfall 2 might well be this years best surprise. The original games gorgeously tactile, flowing traversal systems always had great potential as the fuel of a single-player campaign, but the care and craft that Respawn has instilled into creating that adventure will blindside you. Its immediately gratifying on a moment-to-moment basis, but as a complete work and experience, its one of the most creative and rewarding FPS in recent memory.
Source: www.gamesradar.com
