Platform Played On: PC
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| About five seconds before I begin getting my ass kicked. |
Rating: 8/10
Verdict: TITANFALL is an intense multiplayer experience, but it leaves a little to be desired outside of the actual combat.
TITANFALL -- I know it's not supposed to be capitalized, but it's something I started doing as a joke in the Weekly News Round-Up to stress how intense the game is going to be -- was hyped. Really hyped. It was going to be the Call of Duty killer. It was going to give us something we've never had before. The innovation would lead to world domination. So does this multiplayer-only shooter live up to the potential and the hype? Sort-of.
Let's get a couple things out of the way:
- A multiplayer-only game is fine so long as the multiplayer offers something interesting. A lot of first-person shooter fans will spend hours upon hours on multiplayer alone, with some not even playing the campaign.
- I think more than any other genre, the FPS is dependent on "feel." This means that it doesn't matter how great a game is, if it doesn't feel right to you, you won't like it. For example, Killzone is my favourite FPS series because I like how heavy it feels. Whereas, I don't got them feels for a game like Call of Duty (this is important in the review). It's just personal preference and anybody who tries to tell you different should be locked in a room with a prime Mike Tyson and told to box him.
Detractors will call TITANFALL a "Call of Duty with mechs," and that's true to an extent. The shooting/way the guns handle is very much straight out of the CoD playbook, which is no surprise considering who developed this. It's quick and there's little recoil. Where it differs from Call of Duty is the movement and obviously the Titans. You move gracefully and quickly in this game, being able to jump, double jump and wall-run. It's incredible that they got this so right, and it's absolutely a blast to jump into buildings, across buildings or onto the roofs of buildings. This is a large part of why TITANFALL appealed to me from the moment it was announced, and it's definitely a selling point even now.
The Titans are also the element that makes this stand-out from CoD. You are an extremely agile pilot but the action gets bigger when you drop a Titan into the battle and you can get in and control these beats.
This game's combat only works because of the polish and balance. If this game wasn't balanced I think it would hurt it more than most games, because both humans and giant walking death tanks occupying the same battlefield could spell trouble. So rest assured, Respawn has done everything they could to make this a smooth experience for everybody. There are clear advantages to being a Titan, like firepower, but you are not completely out of the fight if you're a pilot. You can duck in and out of buildings easily, and it's extremely satisfying jumping up a building, running across the roof and riding an enemy Titan while blowing it to pieces. Or you could always just use the anti-Titan weaponry that you are automatically equipped with, so while it takes a few shots, you usually have other people firing at the Titans anyway. Don't get confused, seeing a Titan if you're a pilot is still scary shit like it should be, but you aren't automatically dead.
Part of this is because of the level design. They did good work here, offering over ten maps that are a good balance of indoors and outdoors. This is important since going indoors is best way to not get killed by Titans. I don't know why some people wanted destructible environments because that would kill the balance, but people are strange. The combination of well-designed levels and the ability to jump everywhere means that it's hard to camp and there are always interesting and exciting ways to enter buildings or get out of them.
Your Titans actually drop pretty frequently. Even though the matches are short, even if you aren't that good you should be able to get a couple drops in at least. Kill some grunts and you can have more. I had a conversation with my brother and neither of us are sure if the frequency of the drops is good or bad. I guess it's good because honestly, the game is called TITANFALL, so it's to be expected.
I'm iffy on the bots. I understand why they're there -- anti-camping and a way to balance the game by allowing everyone to get Titan drops more often -- but I think I would have preferred just slightly larger games. There are tactical advantages to the bots, because if you kill them you get points and it speeds up your Titan drop, or you can hide within a group of them and fool your enemies, but I find myself looking at bots way too often and getting killed by a real player. That could just be me being terrible at the game, but I still think there are ways to balance the game without having bots, especially considering they're always in there, with one of the game modes being one where you only get points for killing Pilots. Seems silly, but they are there for a logical reason so I'm not outright condemning it.
Even though I actually hate how Call of Duty feels, I'm more forgiving here because it makes sense. I don't think mechanics like Killzone would be appealing here, though a little recoil would feel nice. You still feel a bit like paper, but again, since I can double jump and run across walls I'm more okay with it than I would normally be.
Someone in the chat said, and this isn't a direct quote, "This is one of the only games where you could suck but you still do something cool every game." This is an intense game. People do cooler things than me, but I've done things like wall-chase a guy while shooting at him. I've been in frantic Titan battles, ejected onto a building, shot a rocket and blown up the Titan. I've seen an enemy Titan, ran to the other side of a building, jumped on top of it, ran to the edge, jumped off onto the enemy Titan and blew it up. I've seen people jump kick me in incredible ways. I've gone into Titan battles four Titans deep, and it's very cool being part of a large Titan march like that. It doesn't matter how bad you are, you'll probably do something neat, and the action will remain fast and absurd at all times. Believe me, I suck badly, but I still have a blast.
There are also little touches that I enjoy. I like having to evacuate at the end of matches by running to a dropship that can be blown up by the other team. It adds to the frantic nature of the game. I also like how it shows you jumping out of the dropship at the beginning of games because again. These are little touches but I like them.
So why is this game only an 8 then? Read on, my son.
For being a full-priced multiplayer-only game, it doesn't offer a lot of content. Sure, the combat itself is some of the more interesting FPS combat because of how it blends together a bunch of different games within the genre, but the rest of the game leaves a little to be desired.
If you're going to charge regular game price for a game that is dependent solely on being able to go online (meaning if the community ever died, well, you're shit out of luck... not that it will for a long time), you need to add some depth.
For example, the character customization is Call of Duty-lite. You pick your gun, attachments, and your tactical abilities and whatnot, but there's not much to it. There aren't many guns or attachments, and while being able to customize your Pilot and Titan loadout is fine, it still operates on the same progression system that we're all used to... and arguably does it worse than some of these other games. Love it or hate it, Killzone: Shadow Fall tried to do something different and abandoned the typical XP system we are familiar with. I'm not saying they should have done something so drastic, but this is a multiplayer-only game. Do something intriguing. I could be remembering MAG wrong, but I seem to remember it having a much better progression system. Hell, Dust 514 is incredibly (maybe overly) complex, and while the progression in that is dampened due to the free-to-play nature of gaining points, it's still a game that tried something big. I'm not saying TITANFALL needs to be Dust 514 -- TITANFALL is a better game -- but I'm left disappointed regardless.
If you're looking for game modes, TITANFALL doesn't give you many, and the ones it does give are pretty standard, outside of Last Titan Standing which starts you in Titans in a round-based game where you only get one life per round. The normal modes enter the fray like Capture the Flag or Hardpoint (which is Domination), but honestly this doesn't bother me much on a personal level because I only play a couple modes in shooters anyway. Still, again, this is a multiplayer-only game so they should have stepped their game up here as well.
The campaign is good in spirit but is ultimately just a bunch of multiplayer matches. The story doesn't matter because you don't pay attention to it while you're fighting because who has time? There are Titans everywhere! It's a nice thought, but it was unnecessary. Still, you might as well play it because it nabs you stuff that you wouldn't get just by playing the Classic mode.
The game looks fine. I'm not in awe of the graphics, even on high settings, but there are things going on in the background and they do a good job of making the game look busy while you're playing. I know TITANFALL has gotten criticized, but it's pretty enough. Visual design is more interesting than graphical power anyway, but that's beside the point.
This is one of the weirdest 8 out of 10s I will probably give a game. The fact is that I enjoy the hell out of the game when I'm in a match, but after the match I am left disappointed with what the game has to offer. The movement adds a layer to the game that most games in the genre don't have, but it's a pretty shallow experience out of the actual combat.
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