Titanfall Review

In Titanfall, there is a pistol with homing bullets.

With that, I conclude my review, giving the game a zero out of ten and recommending playing Quake Live instead. They have brought back T7 with T4 in the free map pool.

If game development were an Olympic discipline, developers who pull off such tricks should be immediately disqualified and sent home, while also being banned from making anything remotely resembling a video game for at least five years.

Just like in figure skating: you can do as many triple-quadruple jumps as you want, show off your technique to everyone’s delight, but if you attempt a dangerous flip, even if it has been practiced and perfected ten thousand times, instead of medals, you will receive a ban, and that would be the right thing to do.

But alas.

***

95% of the time, Titanfall is a good team shooter (despite being a reskinned Call of Duty with mechs), and the remaining 5% is a mess that embodies everything that is currently wrong with online FPS games. Well, our classic barrel of honey with a spoonful of a well-known substance.

First and foremost, I want to praise the local “single-player campaign.” Which, firstly, is not at all single-player, and secondly, is not a campaign but rather multiplayer maps arranged in a “story” order. It seems that Brink did a similar trick back in the day, and since then, for some reason, no one else has. But it’s so simple and great at the same time!

On the one hand, the producer is pressured by the trendy to have a Story, and it’s just necessary, but on the other hand, corridor idiocy (with accompanying pompous drama, of course) for such a project is an expensive fifth wheel. What to do? The best answer that has been come up with is to arrange normal arenas in some special way and, while the maps are loading with players, show simple dialogue scenes of a polygonal drama circle. If desired, even monologues can be played during matches. Then, throw ten eager people into one server bank to explore the history of Titanfall, and let them have fun. Beautiful.

Now about the local Call of Duty. There is no need to describe the overall picture in detail – small maps, guns-pistols-rifles, TDM-CTF-Assault, whoever sees the other first from around the corner is the winner. The devil, as we know, is in the details. The most noticeable of them are the infamous titans, also known as combat humanoid robots. I must admit, personally, I didn’t really like the mechs. Yes, they somewhat diversify the gameplay, they are decently controlled (with all those jerks and maneuvers), but it’s not really that interesting to control them. On one hand, it’s not arcade enough (what can you do, it’s all multiplayer), on the other hand, it’s not “simulator-like” enough.

If you want mechs, it’s better to just install Hawken, damn it, even if it’s f2p. In Titanfall, after a few test runs, I started just dropping the titan on the map and leaving it to work in the background. I would climb into the cockpit only if the map turned into a complete Kursk arc.

On the other hand, fighting against titans as a “simple infantryman” is actually quite fun. You dance around them with double jumps, aim your rocket launcher, then you climb up to the second floor of some building, reach for the enemy’s neck and start ripping off the armor and firing the wiring. Beautiful!

Fighting on the ground in hand-to-hand combat is also fun, just a bit different and not always. There are nuances and details, the first of which are, I can’t find a better definition, various super abilities. The essence is that, in addition to the standard double jumps, Titanfall soldiers can perform various tricks, “equipped” in a special inventory slot. The starting focus is temporary invisibility. That is, almost invisibility, in the style of Quake 3. It lasts for about five seconds and recharges quite quickly. Then there are improved jumps, accelerated running, and so on. Plus, there are one-time bonuses – a slightly more powerful gun for one life or something similar – given out as outstanding tokens after matches.

The aforementioned features, firstly, allow gamers to diversify their own game, and secondly, make the Capture the Flag mode inconvenient for the simple reason that Titanfall is not Unreal Tournament and not the already mentioned (what can you do, a pillar of online FPS) Quake.

The point is that the second distinctive feature of shootouts in Titanfall – the aforementioned double jump – allows, with the right combination of power-ups, to turn the character into a spider-man. However, not everyone and not always will be able to enter such an overdrive of jet parkour. In other words, one and a half diggers carry flags, while the other eight players on the map work as shooting furniture.

It’s good that there are also maps for classic control of key points in the game, otherwise there would be nowhere to go from mindless deathmatches.

The last colorful detail of the shooter is the stat bots.

Almost all battles in Titanfall take place in a “six on six” format, so the scale and epicness of the meat grinders in the game are not very impressive. The situation is saved by packs of computer dummy bots that periodically respawn on both sides of the barricades.

They don’t provide much strategic value – the bots don’t perform any specific tasks and don’t deal much damage. But they are good at two things – getting in the way of live enemies and creating the illusion of powerful widespread movement.

At first, this crowd of bots is confusing. Two seconds ago, you delivered three consecutive headshots to enemy heads, earned points for achievements, calmly started reloading, and it turns out that you killed bots all this time, and you were being targeted by a homing pistol. With practice, of course, comes better orientation on the battlefield, but the need to waste ammo on dummies during a heated fight can be irritating.

In general, the gameplay is cool, but various nonsense occasionally annoys, not in the style of “I’ll show you, bastards, on the next map”, but rather “where is the exit button”.

The little things in life. The graphics are at a good level, not stunning, but pleasant. Of course, it’s preferable to play normally with minimal frills, but if you really want to, you can still crank up the shiny stuff to the maximum available on your computer – the engine works pretty fast overall.

The maps are mostly good as well. Except for some unbalanced or boring arenas, there are no invalid CTF maps.

***

I’ll repeat. Titanfall is Call of Duty with mechs. Which, probably, is good compared to classic Call of Duty. Personally, it didn’t really hook me, but I recommend it to all genre lovers. On the current progamer.ru scale, I would give it 82 out of 100.