Fightin’ Tall™ (robots) 2: A game that knows exactly what it is and wants to be
An exercise in doing something well, even if not necessarily new.
No matter how you slice it, I am decidedly not an FPS player. Yet, the first game I ever properly played as an adult who games was Portal. By no stretch of definition will I ever consider myself a competitive online player. Yet, the first Respawn game I ever played was Apex Legends. It takes three for a pattern to emerge, but with my reliability soundly in question, I have two words to describe the single player campaign of Titanfall 2: great fun.
As I realised writing this, critique is much easier when you’re, well, critical of something. To critique Titanfall 2 then, would be to try and define the unpinnable quality of what constitutes fun.
I cycled through a few questions that were all, more or less, similar to: what is it that you would describe as fun about <insert fun activity here>? But I thought better of it because that’s exactly the kind of thing that Titanfall 2 doesn’t do.
It’s not ponderous, it’s not philosophical, and perhaps most importantly, it isn’t painfully self-serious.
The game wastes no time throwing you in the thick of things, and not for a second do you feel out of your depth. When you’re shown the ropes, in a tutorial disguised cleverly as an introduction, the game evaluates your skill and recommends a difficulty. Being as effective as a Magikarp, I was advised to begin the game on the regular difficulty. But being just as dense as a Magikarp, I chose hard.
Even still, you never get the sense that things would make just a little bit more sense if you’d played the first one. It’s a standalone campaign in its own right, and a damn good one at that. The IMC – the baddies – are engaged in crooked business, shoring up resources in far reaches of space, at the edge of human expansion, as the Frontier Militia – you (a Pilot that can operate an otherwise autonomous Titan) – are fighting for the same resources. Fighting to survive. Even that bit of exposition isn’t delivered in the game as a dump. You feel it as you play. This is not to say that the game does not fall back on familiar, maybe a little tiresome, tropes like chunks of story played out as environmental holograms, but they keep the plot moving briskly and don’t actually take away from the experience.
And being a self-contained experience, it’s utterly satisfying. It’s complete.
The story, while nothing never-before-seen, is written and presented in about the best way that it can be. Considering that the single player was, for all intents and purposes, an afterthought, its merit is all the more impressive.
The impression
I can’t remember the last time a game, or any software for that matter, was a pleasure to simply navigate. And I don’t mean the movement, which is a whole different thing for me to gush about. No. The UI.
Progressing to a new chapter throws up a mission log on the loading screen, which if you weren’t done reading, don’t panic (I’m likely part of a minority where if I miss something briefly, however insignificant/irrelevant, I cannot go on without knowing what it was that I missed. What if it happened to be crucial?! Or maybe really funny?). Once the game is done loading up, you only resume when you press X (on the PS4). The logs are not vital to understanding the game, or being in on the narrative, by the way. Which is not to say that they’re unnecessary or useless. They add something to your experience without taking anything away if you, for some reason, miss it. Where I’m from, we call that excellent design.
I know there are other games that do this – Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, to name one – but not enough is my point. It’s such a simple quality of life improvement that goes such a long way.
And when the loading screens look as gorgeous as they do in this game, you will definitely want to pause and bask in their splendour.
But it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. The Press X to continue banner covers the entire width of the screen, and, well, I’d rather it didn’t.
I haven’t played very many shooters, but from the moment I picked up the controller, I was floored by how goddamn good it felt to be playing this game. The gunplay animations, reticles, the HUD, the transitions, the audio, all of it was clearly crafted with care, and it shows. I will use the word smooth here, because I’m reserving fluid for something else.
Everything serves its purpose and nothing overstays its welcome. The HUD, for example, doesn’t send a constant barrage of useless information your way. It’s minimal, non-intrusive, and mostly just stays out of the way. I know Titanfall 2 released before photo modes became all the rage, but boy would I have loved to see one for the game.
Or at least the option to hide the weapon information overlay. You know you’re reaching when you’re complaining that there aren’t enough ways to enjoy how pretty a game looks.
Embarking BT – your Titan – plays an animation that varies slightly depending on your Pilot’s state when you hit the button. Walking, running, sliding, airborne – the differences are subtle, but they look fantastic. If you move away from your Titan when he’s talking to you, there is a point when you will start hearing his voice over your comms, as opposed to his voice just naturally carrying to you. I couldn’t help but grin in glee as I hovered around that transition distance, moving back and forth, listening to BT’s voice switch mediums like it was the most natural thing in the world.
However, if I stood around too long, BT’s instructions would start verging on the cusp of grating. I remember one instance particularly at the beginning of chapter 5: Effect and Cause, where I was fairly annoyed by BT repeating roughly 685 times the exact lines, “Uphold the mission. I am detecting a faint biosignature on the upper level of the reception lobby. Recommend you investigate.” Now, granted, he probably repeats the mission objective every time you’re taking a bit too long, meaning this was the only place in which I bummed around for quite some time, for this specific line to get on my nerves. “I know where to go, BT, would you shut up for two seconds?! I just want to see if there’s some ammo under these stairs, god!”
Silence would have been better; some variety, preferable.
One other thing that vaguely disappointed me was the fact that I couldn’t walk between my Titan’s legs. They are clearly far enough apart to let a wee human walk through, but no. You collide against invisible barriers near the large robot limbs. I tried over and again in many different levels to no avail.
Everything weighed fairly though, the design choices hit more than they miss. In all the ways the game presents itself, it’s instantly likeable. But, presentation, while crucial, is not the fundamental core of a game. Which brings me to…
The play
Playing Titanfall 2, for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t going through the motions to make the next achievement unlock. I cede that this is more my behavioural quirk than it is the fault of any game, but in the past, I’ve had to, on multiple occasions, force my brain to dislodge and enjoy the experience, rather than feed into my completionist compulsions. I partly blame Sony, because I never had this problem on Steam. There’s something about the PlayStation 4’s gamification that makes a trophy popping just the right amount of addictive. (What a world we live in, that we now have complaints about the gamification of games).
Aanyway. Titanfall 2 had me ignoring the impulse to collect all trophies without me even realising it. I was too engrossed to care. When I moved, I wanted to keep moving; when I shot a gun, I wanted to keep shooting; when I…actually, that’s it. That is all there is to do in this game. It’s an oversimplification, sure, but not by much.
It’s a testament to how polished the core game loop is that it doesn’t feel repetitive at any point. Although, the length of the campaign being a crisp 6–10 hours probably played no small part.
The movement – there really is no other word for it: fluid. Running along a wall feels as natural as breathing. Or, you know, pushing on a controller’s thumbstick. This is possibly the only game I’ve seen with a slide/roll mechanic that at least pretends to slow you down when you’re heading up an incline or flight of stairs. Airtight, responsive controls are surprisingly rare. Why? I cannot reasonably fathom. Nonetheless, the game, in many places, evoked a resounding reminiscence of Portal and its sequel.
The following section spoils a game mechanic that I’m glad I didn’t know about going in. If you too wish to savour the surprise, skip ahead to the section that starts after the next . . .
Apologies for the word soup that is to follow. While Portal was a spatial puzzle platformer with a spatial mechanic, Titanfall 2 tests your spatial dexterity with a temporal mechanic. Let’s move on to the mains, shall we? About a third into the game, you steal a friendship bracelet off the corpse of a Frontier Militia Major, because let’s face it, if no one’s claimed his body after all this time, he likely doesn’t have very many friends. You on the other hand, alive, kicking and wallrunning, could use some friendship. Plus, it lets you travel through time. With the push of a button, you can jump to one of two different points in time.
The corridor in front of you has fallen into fiery ruin and is doing its best to channel the spirit of Beelzebub’s bathtub. You have no way forward. Jump to the past for a 100% fire-free corridor. One of those pesky, biometric doors is giving you a spot of bother. Jump to the present where it will almost definitely have broken down.
Time travel. It’s the solution to all the world’s problems. The game will have you jumping through time at the very same moment you’re jumping from wall to wall, making you feel like Spider-Man…erm, like a Titan Pilot. (Does that qualify as a Freudian slip?)
I think my immediate reaction at the time I was introduced to this mechanic sums the experience up – me with a stupid grin going: cooooooool! (stupid grin not included).
Another nifty little use for this sufficiently-advanced-technology bracelet is that it lets you catch your breath in combat. Feeling overwhelmed? Zooop! However, the time travel does not give you a free pass. You can’t just skip an entire encounter by going back to the future; they have murder lizards there.
What it does give you is a couple of seconds to collect your thoughts before you’re set upon by the inevitable swarm, and it’s fucking awesome.
You have now been saved from spoilers. The magic is intact.
And speaking of combat, the difficulty was perfectly balanced, I thought. Enemy loadouts had enough variety that every battle was interesting and fresh to the very end. With Kane, the first boss, I died repeatedly and had to Respawn™ every two minutes. Ash, the second boss, I ripped through, shredding her in about 15 seconds by expertly spamming BT’s Tone loadout. No subsequent boss was ever again that frustrating or that easy.
As inexperienced as I am with shooters, this game cleverly got me taking stock of all the tools at my disposal, including ordnance like throwables, and I never pay attention to throwables. The encounters were scripted in ways that naturally made me remember the options available to me.
Although, I almost never used the cloak mode; at all. Titanfall 2 is, by no means, a stealther, but an ability as seductive as turning invisible – seems a shame that it doesn’t have the room to be a significant mechanic.
By the last third of the game, you get something called an Arc Tool, that lets you manipulate your environment conveniently, bringing walls toward you so you can, you guessed it, run on them. Spatial dexterity once again comes into play here, needing you to activate platforms on the fly (literally) so you can get from A to B. The sad thing though, is that if you missed your window and fell to your demise, the platforms you activated before your unplanned descent stay activated when you Respawn™. This completely strips away any illusion of challenge, and I wish the game were just a tad more unforgiving in this respect.
Still, the impeccably tailored moment-to-moment gameplay is so engaging, that the little time you do spend on this game will seem like even less.
The momentum
If you’re much too busy trying to hack the very ecosystem in an attempt to lure butterflies, finally find them, rip their wings off, use the wings to make phallic designs in a river, and then carry a cabbage to the top of a mountain — with your mind, it’s perfectly understandable. Accounting for player agency is one of the most challenging aspects of dealing with a medium as open-ended as games. Unlike a book or film, there’s only so much that can be controlled. Which is why, when you’re subtly (or otherwise) nudged with how imperative it is that you save the world, and save it right away – you can’t help but remember that you’re playing a video game. The flow of time matters only when you reach certain arbitrary points. Despite Titanfall 2 being the exact same, it never feels that way. The pressing sense of urgency lingers no matter if you take your sweet time; you never feel a lull in the narrative momentum. I have no idea how they managed it, but by god, they did.
How you’re kept moving from point to point – not just geographically, but also narratively – constantly keeps you in the game. Trophies pop at just the right times, and checkpoints are spaced fairly.
A great anecdote about trophies and checkpoints: there’s a trophy in the game called I’m Not Locked in Here With You that you get for killing two Reapers in a particular section of the game (this was the section that triggered my initial association with Portal, but I suppose if you have a vaguely robotic female voice talking over your gameplay, with derision snide enough to make you question your entire existence, it’s sort of impossible not to draw that parallel; Valve’s game definitely supplied Respawn with some inspiration). Now Reapers aren’t quite as menacing as Titans, but they are autonomous, huge, and still kick your sorry Pilot ass. So when I reached the section where I had to fight two at the same time, I promptly ran the other way. They sent Ticks after me. A Tick – or as I like to call it: an exploding radioactive mutant mushroom fuckface – is an enemy type that chases you down and explodes when it’s close enough. With these chasing me, I ran even faster, i.e. exerted dangerous levels of pressure on my thumbstick for no discernable reason. Despite the valiant effort, they caught up. Both the Ticks and the Reapers. The Ticks then exploded, apparently taking the Reapers with them as it would turn out. I too died, of course. But as I lay dead on the ground, a trophy notification sounded. It read: Defeated the Reapers in Ash’s Simulation Dome. I respawned. The game had already checkpointed after the death of the Reapers. I’d just gotten an achievement for attempting an “impromptu tactical retreat” and then dying. It was glorious.
This will forever go down in the annals as one of my best trophy stories ever, and nothing can ever make me change my mind about how much I love the game that gave me the memory.
The conclusion
Titanfall 2 is decisively not a “choose your own approach” buffet. You can’t, for example, choose to play stealthily. It knows what it’s good at — shooting and movement — and it doubles down on it. But it still allows for a remarkable motley of playstyles. Cowardice, tact, might, brute force, sheer obstinacy, any one of those is a completely valid approach; with the different loadouts for your Titan, no matter the kind of player you are, there’s something for you here.
The game is also cheeky in the best way. Banter between my character and BT had me chuckling throughout. The writing struck all my chords just right. For defeating Ash, the second boss, the achievement is called Dust to Dust. It wasn’t until after I finished the game that it clicked for me. Ashes to ashes! So macabre; especially since I literally burnt her to cinder in the game. I loved it.
I got the game at a steep discount, and I will likely never touch the multiplayer. But in all honesty, even if I’d paid full price to only never explore the developer’s actual focus of the game, it would have still been worth it in my books.
I can’t wait to see what they do with Jedi: Fallen Order.
