Titanfall 2 - The full REVIEW
Titanfall sold over a million units and helped Xbox One sales, it was also a lot of fun to play, but was lamented for not having any offline campaign. Repsawn have sought to address this with the imminent arrival of the cross platform sequel Titanfall2, complete with single player campaign.
But how do you condense and make linear, but with a sense of freedom the general chaos that was Titanfall into a single player campaign? Thankfully developers Respawn have done a decent job of retaining the essence of movement and carnage that made Titanfall so great into a single player game.
The eight main campaign levels are large and varied enough not to become repetitive and chock full of enemy Grunts, Titan’s and Spectres to blast through.
You play as Jack Cooper a lowly grunt on the frontline of the conflict between the Militia (good guys) and the I.M.C (bad guys). You are in the right place and right time to have a dying pilot give you control of his Vanguard Class Titan (BT7274, BT for short) and so the much-anticipated Titanfall 2 single player campaign begins.
Respawn have really amped up the ways in which to make light work of your foes. There are weapon caches everywhere (I only got in a tight spot with no ammo a handful of times) usually with different equipment to what you may have. Want to full auto fire a stream of plasma balls into someone making them explode in a plume of gore? Check, you can with the L-Star, a plasma rifle that is a definite wink to the BFG in Doom, it even overheats if you are too trigger-happy.
There are some interesting new grenades (closer to exploding shurikens) as well, the gravity star and the fire star. The former sucks enemies into it’s own gravity well, rendering them helpless for some extra shots, before exploding. The latter explodes on impact leaving a white-hot pool of fire, which will melt any enemies, stupid enough to try and traverse it.
Your Titan BT is equally well armed, as the campaign progresses you will come across load-outs for BT, significantly changing his combat options, these are the new Titan chassis that are available in the multiplayer, giving you the opportunity to burn, slice and snipe your way through foes.
These are placed in areas were it is apt to use them and the best thing is you can swop them out on the fly.
Continuing on from Titanfall the South Afrikaner mercenary pilot Blisk is back working for the IMC, but not alone. He’s bought with him his gang of evil mercenary goons, who goad you throughout your missions until you finally meet them face-to-face for a boss showdown. These are memorable fights, one in particular sees you fighting above a factory that has been making prefab cities in sections. The mission has you traverse the factory processing the sections, playing out as part platformer part shooter as you avoid being crushed by machinery and falling to your doom, whilst dealing with Grunts and Specters. You finally get to the end of the production line as the factory constructs the prefab city above ground for you to have an epic boss battle in.
Whilst it’s great to finally have a single player campaign there is nothing majorly fresh to make it stand out from the crowd from other sci-fi shooters. Don’t get me wrong; it was a fun experience whilst it lasted, it just seems it would have been better received if it had shipped with the original two years ago.
The storyline has the usual sci-fi shooter tropes and clichés, although Respwan did a good job of humanizing BT, with some amusing dialogue between Jack Cooper and BT which will take a couple of playthroughs to hear them all.
By the end of the campaign I had genuine affection for my destructive sidekick. The single player is a blast albeit a short one, however the multi-player retains all of the kinetic carnage of the original, along with a plethora extras to make it markedly different.
The ending leaves it open for a sequel, and I for one hope that there is more mileage in this Titan’s battery yet.
Overall Titanfall 2 is a good game, the campaign is short a d not particularly ground breaking, but the multiplayer is great fun and has been tweaked perfectly.
You can find our thoughts on multiplayer here.