I’m a little bit mad that no one told me about this game for years.
So recently there was a Steam sale for a game I’ve never played called Titanfall 2 for 3 dollars with the Ultimate Edition no less. A 90% discount is a huge thing for any game honestly and I picked it up. I had also heard whispers in the past from others about how Titanfall 2 was connected with the universe of APEX Legends or rather APEX Legends takes place within the Titanfall universe, another game I enjoyed playing for several of its seasons. I’ve never played the first Titanfall and so before I dove into Titanfall 2 which came out in 2016, I looked over the first Titanfall plot and setting so I didn’t miss out as I am a big lore guy.
Settings & Accessibility
First, the settings and especially the accessibility options for Titanfall 2 were noticeably better than some other games I’ve played when it came to graphic customization and player accessibility. It is awesome that Titanfall 2 has a colorblind mode when in 2023 as of this video we still have triple A games not even have that which to me is a bit disappointing. Of note within the settings are nice adjustments for the ragdoll physics, impact marks and field of view which I definitely had to adjust. I did notice that there was a lack of motion blur which honestly is fine by me since I personally turn off or turn down motion blur for most games I play anyway. I would say one thing missing from the settings is that you can’t completely get rid of screen shake but to be honest with Smooth Sprint View on, it didn’t feel like I noticed screen shake anyway as I played through the story and multiplayer.
User Interface and User Experience
Going off of that, the User Interface and User Experience are really straightforward and that’s somewhat expected as it’s a shooter and not a RPG or MMO. There’s no confusion, no questions about how to navigate the systems of the game and the tooltips that you can have as options are more than sufficient to let you understand what things are or what will work before you even pick them up.
Audio
The very first thing I notice as I’m taken through the beginning sequences of Titanfall 2 or really any game nowadays is the music. The music in this game is great but above all appropriate at the right times during the missions I played in the story which lent emotion to what was going on. I have absolutely no complaints about the sounds of various audio effects whether they pertain to the guns, movement, abilities and the voice lines that can play during fights. I think the voice acting was decent but not as phenomenal as some other IPs and I did think a couple characters were a bit over the top like Richter with his Arnold Schwarzenegger accent but if that was the intended artistic effect I guess that’s fine. Above all else, I think the best part of the audio work is definitely in the gunplay. The sounds of a R-201 or BT’s – your Titan – different loadouts contribute to the really nice tactile feel of shooting in Titanfall. I will kind of get more into the combat and gameplay here in a bit but I just have to mention that the audio works really really well with the weapons and abilities.
Graphics, Art and Environment
The next obvious thing I want to talk about is the graphics, art and environment design for Titanfall 2. If you’re a stickler for gorgeous looking games and you’re worried about Titanfall 2 being over 7 years old or potentially looking outdated, have no fear as Titanfall 2 looks really great graphics-wise. The best part of it is that the FPS is reliable and consistent at least for my setup (2080 TI, i9-9900k). The level and environmental design of the single player campaign missions makes it so that you can approach moving through them in slightly different but oddly satisfying ways via movement or stealth. My favorite level design by far was definitely going through the factory assembling mock environments and you can tell that the developers put a lot of thought into not just making the environments enjoyable for the players to fight and explore in but also incorporateda a decent amount of storytelling into each environment as well, which is something I find surprising in a first person shooter that’s not an older Halo game. The design and aesthetic of the mechs or Titans and the portions of the levels designed for their usage also look and feel great which leaves you wanting more of the Titans which unfortunately I felt like didn’t feature as prominently as I thought they would in the story playthrough. However the gameplay as the Pilot is more than enough made up for it.
Gameplay and Combat
The story gameplay consists of you as a Pilot tackling on your enemies from the IMC and its mercenary allies with both weapons and the ability to wallrun which is a feature I absolutely love and wish that a few more games would risk doing. Of course you also have Titan combat which is when you embark into your Titan, BT, to fight as a mech with which you can also access different weapons and abilities. The combat feels really great, the guns feel great, the game not being afraid to show you what weapons or a Titan’s punch does to the fleshy human body is great, I have nothing bad to say about any of the combat at all although it feels like the movement of BT feels clunky at times depending on the terrain you need to traverse but that’s a very minor thing. The controls for wallrunning are really straightforward which lets you push a higher skill ceiling in my opinion. The ability to run and gun at the same time or shooting while sliding around corners like in APEX Legends make the combat feel really enjoyable and not at all repetitive. Every single gun I picked up felt great to use unlike APEX Legends however. Titanfall 2 may be the only game where I can say I enjoy using the dreadful Mozambique. The guns feel like what APEX Legends guns should have been ironically enough.
Story/Length
For the story of Titanfall 2, again I didn’t play the first one though at this point I feel like I should, it seemed pretty straightforward and also familiar due to the fact that APEX Legends takes place within this universe. So the weapons, some of the characters, objects, organizations and other things seen or mentioned in Titanfall 2 were both new and familiar to me as a player. I really did enjoy the mid-play or mid-action dialogue options offered to me when exchanging conversations with BT who I absolutely enjoyed as a character with his comedic and heartbreaking Trust Me’s. I enjoyed that each level design had something deeper in terms of story to offer if you look around a little bit more. However I also felt like there was a disconnect between myself and Cooper, the protaganist through whom I was experiencing Titanfall 2. It didn’t feel like Cooper had a lot of emotion especially towards the end when it came to BT because my girlfriend and I certainly did but then it sort of felt like despite some of the themes or story segments borrowing a bit from the Halo franchise, Titanfall 2 also borrowed a bit of the storytelling formula from the Call of Duty franchise if that makes sense as the one other complaint I have is about the story length but in a good way, it definitely made me wanting more, wanting more lore, wanting more missions and gameplay. It felt short and sweet is how I would describe it. And I guess due to the multiplayer being implemented, they opted for a shorter but more well polished single player.
I definitely felt like the single player of Titanfall 2 again was straightforward, it delivered a solid and very enjoyable chaotic experience. The game is simply not afraid of throwing you directly into the action to let you figure things out while conversations are taking place and it’s certainly not afraid of letting you enjoy the power ups as you progress through the campaign.
In terms of gameplay length, you can easily beat the story in 4 to 6 hours at most even with messing around. There isn’t too much to go for in terms of the single player for replayability apart from going on the hardest difficulty and finishing up collectibles and speedrunning a couple things but that’s okay because a lot of Titanfall 2’s charm lies in the multiplayer.
Multiplayer
I can definitely tell from the get go that the multiplayer for Titanfall 2 has a lot of potential. Just from playing a few games I could tell that this is a four dimensional shooter with a lot of layers as you progress through the loadout system which continually push you to chase a higher skill ceiling as you keep accumulating gameplay experience. I got a lot of old Halo vibes from the multiplayer system which is a good thing that made me want to keep playing it. Of course there are microtransactions but they don’t seem too egregious nor does there seem to be a pay to win motif going on even for what is essentially an old FPS game.
I found it surprising that not a lot of people at least within my own circles of gaming have talked a lot about Titanfall 2 considering its variety of online game modes and its fun matches. It’s definitely a nice break from things like Call of Duty or a battle royale like APEX or Warzone. The map designs for multiplayer also seem fine though it feels like to me at times that there was some struggle on the dev end to somehow make a couple of the maps work for both Titans and Pilots but that’s just the price I think we pay for both to exist at the same time in a multiplayer setting.
After researching more about Titanfall 2 and its history, I’ve come to understand that I may have just been lucky to have played it at a good time when supposedly a lot of the issues with matchmaking got solved when the Steam sale hit.
Otherwise, I had a lot of fun and the community feels welcoming too at the same time with a lot of people coming to my livestream saying hey Pilot, giving me advice or telling me how much fun or nostalgia they have with Titanfall 2.
Conclusion
All in all, I have to give Titanfall 2 a rating of a 9.4/10, I was close to a 9.5 on this one but some aspects of the single player’s replayability and the way the story felt at different points took off a little bit but overall I really enjoyed Titanfall 2 and I will probably make it my side multiplayer FPS game for a while. It is a little weird to me that Respawn Entertainment never made a Titanfall 3 given how good this game was but a 7 year development cycle these days for a triple A game is kind of the norm and given that there have been speculation that there might be a Titanfall 3 in the near future based on some theories surrounding the Steam sale which just speaks to the popularity of the game, I wouldn’t be surprised if they announced it in the future.