Titanfall | 2 (campaign)

• completed
• singleplayer
• videogames

Fun albeit short. Standout level: Effect and Cause

FWIW I bought the game on sale.

Broad Strokes

I really liked the game, but I don’t know if I plan to replay it anytime soon. I’m sure the movement system has comparable depth to other source games, but I never felt like I was taught it/made use of it beyond “wallrun and slide good”. This is admittedly probably just me being a TF2 (the other one) jumper main and wanting to airstrafe, but if the game has richer movement mechanics, I’d like for it to teach them to me! It doesn’t help that the single player only took me about 5 hours, which isn’t enough to really explore a movement system.

I’ve seen critics comment that the mecha sections are mostly just clunky versions of the suitless sections, and while that’s probably true, the novelty didn’t wear out its welcome for me–I never even tried to intentionally not use BT for a combat section. Mech combat also seems to suit bossfights, and I’d much rather fight a handful of mechs rather than fight a “bossfight” that’s just a series of grunt waves.

Other people¹ have mentioned that the combat and movement are a little at odds with each other–especially regenerating health, but what I think was probably a bigger conflict was the weapons. If you’re wallrunning you slow down or slip lower if you look down or away from the wall too much², so it’s a little silly that the most readily available medium to long range weapons are assault rifles or SMGs. High damage projectile weapons have way less ammo than even the sniper rifles and are rarely carried by enemies, so I basically never used them, which is a shame, because I think they’d complement the fast movement more than any of the shotguns/SMGs/assault rifles, as they’d require less tracking while still requiring some amount of skill in prediction.

Nitpicks

• I’m glad the game doesn’t overstay its welcome, but I wouldn’t have minded the game being longer

• It took me a little bit to realize that the acid waterfall wasn’t actually timed and I needed to kill the dropping in enemies rather than just evade them for long enough, which was both slightly frustrating and a bit of a missed opportunity.

• The plot was just ok. It was obvious the mentor guy was going to die from the moment the training segment ended, and I cared about everyone else even less, except for maybe BT.

Footnotes