Titanfall review: mech-smashin' good, but not perfect

Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall may be the most hotly-anticipated first-person shooter since, well, the last time these guys made a game. After the success of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, relations between publisher Activision and developer Infinity Ward fell apart during the release of its sequel, Modern Warfare 2. The studio heads, and a lot of its development talent, jumped ship and respawned at Respawn, where they’ve been working on Titanfall for Activision rival EA ever since.

Hate reading? Watch our video review instead.

So is Titanfall the true heir to the Call of Duty throne? Is Respawn returning to the kingdom after a long absence to slay the pretenders and lay claim to being the best FPS developer in all the land? Have I been watching too much Game of Thrones? Read on for the answers to some of those questions.

Gameplay

In Titanfall, you play as a soldier in either the corporate mercenary IMC or the civilian militia, battling for dominance on futuristic human colonies in space. At its core, the game is a first-person shooter much like the Call of Duty games that Respawn worked on before it. But there are some new additions to the formula that really shake things up.

The first is the titans, giant mechs that players can call down every so often to smash things up. These giant beasts can follow you or guard a particular area and wreak havoc automatically, but more often you’ll want to climb inside them and unleash devastation yourself.

The second is the parkour-like abilities of the player characters (called pilots), who all have jetpacks that allow for short periods of sustained flight and facilitate wall-running. It’s not quite Mirror’s Edge, but this parkour stuff is a big part of Titanfall, and once you’ve played it you’re going to feel a little bit crippled in other shooter games when you realize you can’t double-jump and wall-run your way to the enemy base.

There are a few other minor changes, too. Pilots can cloak for a few seconds, becoming semi-invisible, and many of the multiplayer modes end with an “escape” coda after the match itself has been decided, where the losing team can earn extra points by making it to an evac dropship, and the winning team can earn extra points by stopping them or simply blowing the ship out of the sky. This might seem meaningless, but it does add a bit of tension to the end of games, and I’ll admit I felt pretty damn accomplished the first time I actually made it to the dropship and escaped after a loss.

Modes