I tend to shy away from any first person shooters now especially ones that aren’t open-world games. They’re just not my thing now that I’m older and they all mostly cater to the multiplayer crowd nowadays anyway. But enough people have called the single-player campaign in Titanfall 2 best-in-class, that is the best entry in the shooter genre for years, that I feel that I have to check it out especially since it’s so cheap now. Honestly this is a 2016 game but I’m so far behind the curve and so ignorant of graphics in general I suppose, that this looks like the prettiest game I’ve played in a while.
As I haven’t played the first game I know nothing at all about the setting and the campaign doesn’t provide much in the way of exposition either. You’re Jack Cooper, a grunt soldier in the Frontier Militia, and your enemies are the IMC. I don’t believe the game ever tells you what those initials stand for but I looked it up later and they’re your standard shady corporate enforcers. You’re sent on a mission to an IMC-held planet called Typhon where a group of mercenaries wipe out virtually everyone. Before he dies, your mentor gives you command authorization over his Titan, a kind of mech designated BT-7274, even though you’re only half-trained. Under BT-7274’s direction, you first try to rejoin surviving elements of the militia only to find that almost everyone is dead. You do come across the IMC research facility where their experiments have caused temporal distortions. Though the facility is wrecked, you learn that they have successfully created a fold weapon capable of destroying an entire planet and naturally your mission is to stop the weapon from being deployed against a militia homeworld.
As with all these single-player linear experiences, the campaign is very short and at normal difficulty quite easy to get through. It also uses many of the same elements we’ve seen in such games: navigate and fight in an environment full of moving platforms, switching between different versions of the same level, being chased around a level by a vastly more powerful enemy, being captured by the enemy and so on. But the execution and production quality are out of this world, so much so that it’s easy to see why this is considered best-in-class. For example, the moving platform level is a huge factory assembly that is putting together entire houses out of many parts. I also love how the game consistently empowers the player. I groaned when I realized that the next level would be about being captured by the enemy because those always suck. But not only does the game let you escape in fairly short order but you are issued with a dinky-looking pistol that turns out to be the single most powerful handheld weapon in the game. It’s a smart pistol that auto-hits enemies and makes speed-running through the level a cakewalk. Of course that raises the in-universe question of why I haven’t been using that all along but it sure is amazing while it lasts.
The highlight of this game is that you can fight both on foot as a soldier and in your Titan. You do feel incredibly powerful in the Titan as you stomp on infantry underfoot or unleash hell with its panoply of weapons including a super-powerful core attack. But you’re no slouch on foot either. With the ability to wall run and double jump across impressive distances while shooting at enemies, your area traversal abilities are unparalleled while the cloak ability lets you bug out of any tight situation. Even when faced with hordes of enemies, it’s relatively easy to run rings around them with such abilities. Naturally you need to use this agility to navigate the levels as well. While I’m usually pretty bad at this kind of platforming it’s not really bad here and you can never really get stuck. If you stand still for a while wondering where you’re supposed to go next or how you’re supposed to reach that ledge over that, a handy hologram pops up to show how it’s done.
Story-wise the game is nothing too special but it’s not bad and most importantly avoids making any egregious mistakes. It predictably tries a little too hard to forge a friendship between the player and BT-7274 and the Titan’s version of humor isn’t really funny to me, but that’s it. The pacing is fantastic and the plot is straightforward and comprehensible, which is enough for me for a game like this. The levels all look great and as I’ve mentioned, the graphics still look amazing to me even if this is some years old now. There are plenty of jaw-dropping cinematic moments and at least one gigantic battle with multiple Titans on the field, which helps make up for how you’re supposed to be a soldier in a military force but are forced to operate alone for most of the game. The whole experience is linear of course but the environments are all usually large enough to put your exceptional mobility to good use and for the Titans to stomp around in.
I probably would never have played this if I hadn’t seen this being repeatedly cited as a fantastic single-player experience. Apparently it didn’t do too well commercially and even though the single-player campaign was added in Titanfall 2 to try to give the multiplayer game longer staying power, it didn’t work. I suppose that means the end of this particular franchise. This only proves how little appreciated short, single-player campaigns like this are in first-person shooters no matter how lavishly produced they are. The same goes for me really. Playing this was an amazing experience but it doesn’t move the needle for me to love the genre again. With no interest in the multi-player side of things, I just don’t feel invested enough to get the wall-running down perfectly or learn the ins and outs of every Titan configuration. I enjoyed it as an action movie type of experience, but I could do that only because I expected it to be relatively short and it’s easy to move on from.
