Titanfall 2: Enchiladas you’d be happy with
Adding Titanfall 2 to my Christmas list was kind of a “I’ll have the enchiladas” decision. It is what it is: Chicken, Cheese, bullet hoses, inhuman parkour, OP robots, and suiza sauce. Hard to fuck up, right? But on the other hand, I could sink my teeth into something complex and interesting: stuffed poblano in mole, Final Fantasy XV, Resident Evil 7 (VR!). But that’s an investment. Meh, enchilada shooter will do great over the holidays. I’ll enjoy it. I’ll feast on multiplayer for a few days and come back to it when I crave brutal mech finishers:
Normally, I’d just ignore the campaign though. Let’s face it, FPS campaigns of late are less than memorable (with some exceptions of course). Especially in the genre of twitch shooter where the primary thirty seconds of gameplay focuses on shit like hitting baddies with neon baseball bats:
Titanfall 2’s campaign was different. It really caught me off guard in a good way. I realize (now) that the game got pretty rave reviews by IGN, Metacritic, and Forbes so it could have been obvious at the time. But, I went into the game last week completely ignorant: no reviews, scores, background, or time spent on the original. It’s a gift in itself when you find production value and a challenge like that inside a genre that dominates eSports title lists. Here are some of my impressions on elements of the game that impressed me (and some that didn’t).
Spoiler Alert: I talk about some story stuff and there are gameplay videos below.
Art and Design
Many times in the game I stopped to admire the attention to detail in the environments, particularly as the game progressed. The first spot I really felt some real attention to detail was beginning with the chapter titled Effect and Cause. You land at a research lab with BT to rendezvous with a Major Anderson and determine what happened at the facility. The scenes at the present are dystopian and eerie.
Face value, these are pretty but not particularly impressive. What I loved was the time-space rift mechanic they introduce in this chapter. You walk through pockets of time-space tears (and later have a wristband) that can put you in the present and the past in the same location. The reason I thought this was so well done is not only does it act as a wonderful story telling tool, but it really adds to the already eerie feel by passively providing context to the player about what happened in a particular place.
The most memorable way this was executed visually was in the chapter Infiltrate the Typhon Facility inside a room with a bunch of droids that are decayed and broken. In the past, the room is clean and white. You can see them come out of their holding areas and attack you. Flash to the present and they’re rusted and broken on the ground. It’s when they start silently waking up, two by two, in the red, dimly lit room and start limping or crawling after you that’s particularly awesome:
The most awesome artwork in the game had to have been the explosion of the “weapon” during The Arc Tool chapter just before the Lab location is left. It’s just awesome. The designers really took a look at all the angles when they put this together. You need to walk around the environment for a few minutes to absorb it and appreciate how that was put together.
Here’s a clip that does it justice:
Skyboxes
The artwork and lighting in some of the areas and worlds in the game were great. Some of the skyboxes seemed to be done with real relief terrain in the foreground so it really adds to the presence:
The backdrops and scenes developed in the airship battle part of the game were also very cool.
In terms of design, the audio was also really well done in the above section with Viper. I really liked the way they did his character’s voice, kind of a cocky fighter pilot. For some reason the digital groan his Flight Core ability makes is particularly haunting and on-point for a future-tech game like this one. You can watch a clip of that fight scene here.
Boss Intros!
This might be a small thing, but I really enjoyed the way they introduced bosses in the game. There are only several but it was cool, added, some personality, and felt old school. Here are some good ones:
Puzzles
Puzzles may be too strong of a word…But platforming challenges + game mechanics were done surprisingly well in a game genre where, as I mentioned earlier, your prime directive is to nail spray, snipe, sprint, reload, and repeat. The time-rift mechanic I mentioned earlier on became a good amount of fun right about the time you realized the NPCs in the past would definitely shoot at you. It was very ‘Portal-esque’ and done well alongside the narrative. It gets particularly intense when diving down a cooling vent where, in the past, the fan blades are moving, and in the present the blades are flaming obstructions 😬.
Wall running is…wall running. They do spice it up a bit with some sonic “fans” though at one point where you need to navigate through wind tunnels behind “heat sink” partitions without getting blown back to the start. The interesting thing they did with wall hopping was in the level design. They did a pretty great job of allowing you to get from one place to another in a variety of ways. This makes the parkour seem a little more free-willed and fun in an obviously linear game. While that didn’t add a ton to the mechanics of the game, I thought it was fun trying to find the quickest and most bad-ass exit when I was in trouble in The Beacon.
The reason I said “Puzzles” as the subtitle is because it wasn’t just platforming that was interesting to me. There’s also a small element to meta-game when fighting other Titans / Bosses. Of course, this is likely drawn from multiplayer. But I found it refreshing that the multiplayer informed the single player campaign in this way. It’s normally the other way around.
A good example is the boss fight with Viper which I’ve linked a few times now. You’re aboard with two Scorch type Titans and Viper (who is kind of a Brute or Expedition type). You need to decide based on what you know about those Titans how you’re going to come at them. I didn’t go at it like the guy in the video, unfortunately. I tried to take them on head on which didn't go well at first. I tried a couple types out and found one that had the best escape ability, range, and power to get the job done. Then when I got to Viper I flipped to a Northstar class to pick him off from a distance, since he’s agile and has the Titan tethers which will lock you down. It makes it fun and challenging to play that meta-game, especially on harder difficulties. A welcome feature as opposed to blasting through bullet sponges.
SERE Kit FTW
Later in the campaign you extract a kit from BT that enables you to leverage his targeting abilities with an (epic) smart pistol. This kit is called a SERE Kit. I later learned this is an actual program for military training and stands for Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape possible capture. Watch how awesome:
I appreciate this because although Respawn did their FPS campaign a service by providing challenges and characters with personality and style, they still recognize that this thing is still a twitch, wall running shooter. Players are still going to want to (and will) run guns blazing through a sea of bad guys blowing people’s heads off. Because its fun. They recognized this meal is still an enchilada and owned it.
Furthermore, they didn't abuse it. It’s not a recurring thing. You get to run though and light up everything in sight like fucking T-1000 once and only once. That adds some value to it.
BT and the Titans
I liked BT’s character who is voiced by Glenn Steinbaum. It’s easy, in the age of Pixar and DreamWorks to like a lovable token AI robot. He’s not particularly special in that way. But, in a video game you have to take care that he’s not taking the thing over and it’s not completely about him. This was good because again, Respawn and Glenn didn’t overdo it. There’s a handful of humor on certain dialog choices, but it’s geeky, funny, robot mono-toned humor then its over and we’re blowing shit up again. He is also vulnerable, literally. Several times he’s compromised or damaged badly and the situation reflects that. Of course, it’s a hero story so we’re always making a comeback, but I liked that they addressed that, yes, he is a big metal death machine but that like any machine he can be irreparably broken.
I found it interesting that they gave some of the other Pilots’ Titans some personality too. I remember seeing one at its intro sort of taunting you as the Pilot also did. It would pretty cool if they showed a little more of that. But the point is, I think making the Titan 50% of the character and the Pilot 50% is unique and good for the game. It doesn’t make it feel like it’s too centered around a clumsy, lovable A.I.
I will say that the “bond” that he and Rifleman Cooper was a little labored. Just a little. Which is one of the things I expected to dislike.
By the way, there’s some more information on the characters and Titans on the Titanfall Wiki. Gotta love wikia for game universes. If you’re a lore-whore you may have a good time at that link.
The Narrative
So, the machine from Contact, the Death Star, and the guy from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare walk into a bar…
Just kidding, it’s not entirely like that. I won’t walk through the whole story here, you can read your walkthroughs or wikia elsewhere. However, I will give a TL;DR and thoughts on the good and bad.
TL;DR
The IMC is an evil militant organization that (according to what I know from audio from this title) makes things for the people of the colonies. They employ a band of mercenaries who also have Titans. The Battle of Demeter leads them to an ancient weapon on another world (like in Halo) that looks like the thing from Contact. It’s powered by a thing that looks like Epcot that sits in the middle, just like in Contact. It blows stuff up like the Death Star or the new Death Star thing from Episode 7. They wanna do that because population control for making their products and killing the entire militia. Chase it down and blow it up.
I won’t say much about the plot because frankly, its basic and there’s not much to say other than the above. It’s not (yet) part of a bigger universe (unless there’s something I don’t know about the first Titanfall) nor has any very loose ends that need tying up (except one, if you watched after the credits), nor has the scale of a broader episodic narrative like those of the Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed series. It was more the smaller details like NPC conversations, the aesthetics, and the locations that did it for me. You are immersed in the location and the challenges. They don’t let you forget those things which is why I think the narrative succeeds. It’s very tactical in nature with the environments and voice actors anchoring you to the story. Which, as I write, I realize is really not much different than many other shooter narratives.
As you’re finding out about the excavation and what happened to Major Anderson, it is genuinely pretty interesting. Due in no small part to the haunting Labs, the time traveling, and the audio recordings made by staff. That stuff makes it.
There are some weird plot holes in the narrative. The more glaring of which is towards the end when Blisk finds you and BT and you’re totally incapacitated. He could easily kill you but does not citing that he’s not getting paid enough to do it and then he bails. Literally, the next thing you do is destroy the damn weapon. I would have been fine if he said “Nah I’ve already been paid, and I don’t want this asshole to destroy planets.” but they didn’t. He just said the IMC didn’t have enough money and left. Certainly ending his life somewhere down the line. At least that’s what I think happens when you screw over a interstellar, militarized monopoly. That just didn’t make much sense.
There was a lack of plot hooks for other games or chapters, but I don’t think that’s Respawn’s goal. And that’s fine. Despite the praise I’ve written here, it’s said with the fact in mind that these types of games aren’t really focused on a deep and intricate narrative. This is probably in no small part due to the fact that the FPS gameplay can’t really withstand that for too long of a campaign before its boring. You have to add lots of other elements to make it work (see Mass Effect). And they’re not making that type of game here.
So again, the plot generally makes sense, but they’re not trying to world build too much here and that’s not surprising.
Back to Enchiladas…
The seemingly dime-a-dozen, run-of-the-mill enchiladas were surprisingly good!
You can see I was able to talk about almost everything other than what would otherwise be considered the key components of fps gameplay. To me that means Respawn has succeeded in creating interesting, challenging gameplay out of something that was originally just a fast multiplayer design.
I hesitate to compare it directly, but even the great fps games like the Halo series (one of my favorite campaigns) had less in the way of challenge/platforming that was interesting. The narrative by itself is pretty cookie-cutter, but integration of mechanics, visual aesthetic, and fun character styling made it interesting end-to-end. When this is layered on top of a fast paced shooter with multiplayer roots, it made for a pleasantly surprising and enjoyable game. A not-so-basic fps enchilada that I’m glad I ordered.
