Titanfall 2 Opinion

Remember what everyone criticized the original Titanfall for?

Oh, I remember how much negativity the game received after it was revealed that it didn’t have a single-player campaign. Well, technically it did, but in reality, it was just the same multiplayer with bots and scripted story lines during missions. It was a disaster!

How could they release a pure online first-person shooter without a boring single-player about endless corridors and bots eager to get in the crosshairs of your scope? It’s absolutely unacceptable. When I buy a multiplayer FPS, I want to spend 30 hours exploring three-dimensional pipes. Otherwise, my happiness will be incomplete.

It seemed like I even praised the developers for amputating that third leg. But it turned out that what was allowed for Overwatch was not allowed for Titanfall, and the team working on the sequel had to give in. What do you do when the whole world is against you and demands that you sew the vestige back on? You sew the vestige back on, and of course, everything will be fine.

Sly corridors

They sewed it, you know. It’s hard to say who benefited from having a single player, really. First and foremost, it’s important to think about the reviewers. Because reviewing multiplayer is about the experience, mechanics, and other not-so-obvious happiness. To truly feel an online shooter, you need to spend at least a few days on it. Better yet, a week, or even better – a month.

If you’re lucky, the developers will be someone like Blizzard, and then you effortlessly write an ode to the local Achilles’ shield. The characters are unique, the world is colorful, the atmosphere is amazing, let me kiss everyone involved. But alas, in Titanfall 2, faceless marines operate faceless robots. Maybe ask about the single-player campaign? In the worst case, we’ll break this single player to pieces, declare it a pointless waste of time, and vividly express our indignation. It’s more fun than spending a week in the negatives and enduring pain and humiliation from unfamiliar schoolchildren.

Yours obediently, for example, did just that.

I must admit honestly, after the first weak boss, I died of boredom and went to play matchmaking. Not only does the single-player campaign not provide a reasonable answer to the question “Why are you even here?”, but it doesn’t even promise to do so. But.

I have to give credit to the developers: they did their job conscientiously. Such honest workers could easily be made to attach a bread slicer to a quadcopter. The design would be meaningless, but it would be so well put together…

So, the corridors. There’s no getting away from them and there’s nothing you can do about them. Nevertheless, the developers tried to at least color our alternative-free pipe, and they almost succeeded.

The first (and in my case, the last) mission throws our nameless, yet still faceless hero into the jungle. Besides the fact that all of our soldier’s teammates were killed, the game has two good news. First of all, the development of the combat suit functionality was handled by the prince of the space Persia. Moreover, the starting planet of the jungle seems to be his homeland. Otherwise, running along sheer cliffs with subsequent double somersaults to the nearest platform cannot be explained.

I was overwhelmed by nostalgia. Jumping on walls, a red scarf, the Godsmack soundtrack… I won’t hide it, it was nice to perform a couple of old exercises in a gentle mode shooter with health regeneration.

By the way, the campaign sometimes tries to disguise its linear pipes with jumps. Oh, from this ledge in the mountain jungle, I can jump to that piece of level where I’ve already been! Cool, a level without barriers!.. After making a trial jump, you quickly realize that it’s all great, but now you have to walk back. You’re a genius, you jumped back half a level.

What the single player mode is really good for is admiring the graphics. The golden rule of online gaming “If you want to play better, turn the graphics down to zero” doesn’t allow you to enjoy juicy landscapes, shiny models, and classic jumps from 60 to 20FPS, but when headshots come right into the crosshairs, you can have some fun. Luckily, graphics in Titanfall 2 is truly good. Well, when you’re not crawling through the sewers and not locked within four concrete walls.

Updated 25.11.2016: Boop! At this point, reality split into two perspectives. A slightly different view. for the Titanfall 2 campaign — by the link.

The same game

Miracles: Titanfall 2 is practically a complete copy of the original Titanfall. In the first session of online battles for control points, you simply remember how it worked, in the second – you look for new things, in the third – you realize that parkour, slides, and other details don’t really change the gameplay as a whole.

Roughly speaking, both Titanfall games are Call of Duty plus a little bit of Hawken. For the most part of the match, you run around as a regular soldier with an automatic rifle and a stealth module. Or a shotgun and a “cat”. Or a rifle and something else. Like any good shooter, TF2 gives the player a certain freedom of movement. However, in order to successfully sneak up on unsuspecting opponents and take them down with a single shot, you need to know what you’re doing, so the first ten hours of my multiplayer gameplay were spent on pointless excursions around the maps with different default loadouts.

Throughout each match, the game sent at least one personal humanoid piloted robot to my location. In fact, this is the whole essence of Titanfall – remove the mechs, and there will be nothing left in the client except for a relatively decent CoD clone.

Mostly, the robots fight each other. This setup dampens the joy of controlling an all-powerful war machine – sitting at the helm of a cool space destroyer is not as fun when there are equally skilled opponents on the other side of the barricades. Happiness comes in episodes when the mech comes across a careless soldier. Even better if it’s two or three in a row. With a strong desire and skill, a standard soldier can penetrate about a third of the robot’s armor, but the robot only needs one well-aimed rocket to earn an honest kill. That’s where the all-powerfulness is, that’s where the uncovered pleasure of shooting helpless losers lies!

But yes, not everything is so simple. A skilled agent on the ground can ruin a pilot’s life if they try too hard. They can mess with the battery in rodeo mode, shoot a laser from around the corner, or throw a pocket EMP. And, if they get carried away, they’ll die from friendly automatic fire.

A few words about game modes and local maps.

Battlefields were perhaps the most obviously weak point of the original. No, that’s not right. Battlefields were the most colorless moment among all the colorless moments of the original. They weren’t repulsive, illogical, or unbalanced. They were lacking something special.

The sequel, I remind you, is no different from the original.

Well, the maps don’t annoy, and that can already be considered an advantage. If you discard a couple of game modes along the way. At first, I didn’t understand why Capture the Flag didn’t have a single active server with at least ten players. Then the unfortunate mode came up in rotation, and everything fell into place. I would have never thought that an FPS game could ruin the CTF mode, but the nature of Titanfall 2 battles dictates a certain scenario for the match, and strangely enough, it doesn’t involve chasing anyone. Your flag was stolen? Forget about it because there are no rocket jumps, no trampolines, the map is not penetrable, and there are two titans guarding the enemy base. So, either one team quickly scores three flags in one goal, or a tedious struggle begins.

There is also a “No Titans” mode in TF2. Why play it is a mystery, comparable in severity to the mystery of the single-player campaign. Otherwise, everything is great, on par with the original.

Conclusion

Titanfall 2 is a well-crafted online shooter with good graphics and dynamic gameplay. Everything is according to the book. The only thing that bothers me is the price of the game. In fact, in 2016, I paid for the product for the second time, which I had already bought in 2014.

The idea is clear, of course. The original took off, but not to the extent that official servers are still overloaded with active gamers. Some people abandoned the game almost immediately, some later, and a lot of people didn’t buy anything at all. It’s the perfect time to add the same multiplayer plus a single-player campaign, so that the press doesn’t criticize and make good money on a project that is already considered finished.

There is a reason for the release of Titanfall 2, yes. But if we’re being honest, all the happy owners of the original keys should be able to buy the game for at least half the price of the $60 they are asking from us. Cosmetic repairs, updated servers, tweaked gameplay, and, damn it, throw in a single-player campaign too. Maybe I liked the first Titanfall and wouldn’t mind getting a new subscription. But you’re not Battlefield or even Call of Duty. The first ones try very hard and unquestionably justify their prices, the second ones are a bit lazier, but still find ways to surprise. And you, Titanfall sequel, surprised me only with your striking resemblance to your older brother.

Expensive pleasure hurts.

Imagine that you have a little book. A big book with bright pictures depicting a fantastic world. It is not filled with details, but it is unusual enough to attract attention and intrigue. Where is it located? What is happening in it? Why does everything look the way it does?

However, it is impossible to understand this because a dozen noisy people have gathered around the illustrations with you. Some are pushing each other, others are giggling, some are practicing drawing vulgar caricatures in the margins, and someone is making paper airplanes out of the pages with accompanying text. And no one, absolutely no one, cares about what the artist wanted to convey.

The impressions from the first Titanfall are exactly the same.

Let’s not forget: games are art. They should be encouraged for their attempts to tell a story, convey a message, besides just being the fastest shooter on the Wild Server. Respawn Entertainment missed this opportunity by releasing a purely multiplayer shooter, and they paid the price for it. But now it seems like everything is in place, yet the sequel still received open dissatisfaction.

This sharp contradiction forced the formation of an emergency commission to dig into the remnants. after our review of Titanfall 2 As it turned out, there is still a lot of interesting and delicious things for those who still love single-player modes in arcade shooters. The following paragraphs are specifically addressed to them.

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Some not very elegant metaphor with leftovers turned out, huh?

At first sight, it is true. Infinite Warfare For the poor, but the further into the forest, the more obvious the differences become. At first – the same irreconcilable factions, flying to each other’s homes on identical ships, organizing extraterrestrial landings in Normandy and other “burn as much as possible” of the last years. If everything had continued in such tones, no one would have listened.

Fortunately, Jack Cooper, our new hero, escapes from all this tiresome fuss as soon as possible and finds himself a new friend. Meet Titan BT-7274, for pilot comrades – simply BT, and for us – a weighty reason to love Titanfall 2. With him, your next blockbuster turns into a personal adventure about how a man and a robot strolled through the fields of battle.

The game did not scatter on secondary characters and focused solely on the central duo – and rightly so, in fact. Bypassing mass battles, serious faces, and dying special forces, our small company paves its way easily and effortlessly, with a large volume of jokes and reflection on what is happening. The heroes undoubtedly play a significant role in the conflict, but the latter is important more as a pretext to show them in some intricate predicament, rather than as an end in itself.

It turned out unexpectedly without militaristic pathos, but with a friendly atmosphere and morals in the spirit of “I don’t care about snow or heat.” Not that no one has done this before – on the contrary, all the tropes are overly banal. However, played out in an era when an original action movie is considered one with a plot as such, they look quite interesting and fresh.

The only major plotline mistake is that it seriously assumes that we are familiar with the lore of the first part. The foundation of the story is only touched upon at the level of general facts, when it would be nice to bring to the surface everything that was buried under a ton of rushed online experience in 2014. On the other hand, the clues that are thrown at us during the narrative at least give us a reason to skim through the dusty wiki pages of the original and find out where it all comes from.

As tempting as it may be to compare it to obvious competitors, Respawn has created a game that is completely different in spirit. And emphasis should be placed on the word “game” – not an interactive dream of Michael Bay.

Titanfall 2 has many game design elements that have long been absent in seasonal entertainments with guns blazing. Here, without any hesitation, they use platform puzzles, come up with new tricks for each new chapter, allow you to choose dialogue lines, and in general, allow you to interact with the game a little more than “don’t touch, it’ll do everything itself.” The biggest spoiler of the mechanics, though, has already been circulated in all the media, but just in case you’re new to this – one episode is so cool that it could have fed a small indie studio if desired.

These inserts are simple, so they don’t cause irritation or unnecessary dead ends. They are small and momentary details, but they are exactly what distinguishes “cinema” from a full-fledged gaming experience. Thanks to them, the locations seem a bit more spacious, the scripts don’t stand out as much, and the overall action brings satisfaction of a gaming nature.

The rest of the time is an unadulterated shooter with not the best rifles and shotguns in the world. What makes it unique, again, is one detail.

No, not the titan. The armed machine, in fact, adds little excitement to the game. It is suddenly fragile and dependent on constant battery injections, not to mention that the disgusting and pointless boss fights happen right inside the walking tin cans. Spamming special moves and finishing off with a charged “ult” is the instruction for every villain in Titanfall 2.

But most importantly, the titans lack the grace of a pilot. Look, even on the cover, it’s clear how poorly BT imitates Cooper.

Respawn operates with the same jump packs and wall runs as everyone else, but they do it so carefully that the movement itself brings separate pleasure. Small details like contextual animations and floating speed depending on the tricks performed make the game feel connected. Mirror’s Edge, and this is probably a compliment of the highest order.

And this is by no means a useless gadget. If Call of Duty introduced exoskeletons into their game simply because it’s trendy, here a whole philosophy of combat is built around it, combining the pleasant with the useful. Mobility is encouraged, not suppressed by endless barrages of bullets: the faster you move around enemies, the harder it is for them to target you. Of course, it applies to you as well, but you’ll manage!

The entire system works extremely well. There is no reason to hold back your acrobatic impulses, so every clash is a furious dynamic and a variety of maneuvers. And linear perception of the level easily breaks in such a situation.

Because of the smooth futuristic parkour, by the way, I spent an extra hour and a half in training, competing with cheating holograms. The only time something like this happened was with the immortal obstacle course from Modern Warfare, but after the training here, it’s time for it to have a well-deserved rest.

So yes, the campaign is by no means rudimentary, like, for example, in [unspecified game]. Battlefield 1 In terms of spectacle, it falls short of the giant Activision, but the pleasant story and design ingenuity make up for it. Well, and the fresh approach, of course.

Early review: campaign

The only thing left is to understand where they saw a revolution and the greatest shooter since Half-Life 2 here. Revolutionaries should change something in the understanding of how to play, and Titanfall 2 only nicely adjusts the familiar path with special directives. There is something in it that you don’t get from annual military corridors – but a revolution? No way.

I can’t vouch for the multiplayer, as it’s difficult to judge based on two trial matches with dismal results, but the single-player game definitely deserves a solid 75%. It’s already very close to what the space epic named John Snow scraped together in total for all its modes.