Titanfall (PC)
Blimey
another review and another FPS. Oh well at least the campaign should be better
this time round right…right?
Welcome
Ladies and Gentlemen. I’m the Guardian and this is the No Holds Barred review of Respawn Entertainments first, and
at this point only, game to grace our
screens – Titanfall.
Now
much like my review of Battlefield 4 I’m going to leave my thoughts on the
campaign until latter as with Titanfall; the campaign very much plays second
fiddle, so as such let’s take a look at the multiplayer.
The
multiplayer for Titanfall is truly something to behold and though it does have a
very Call of Duty feel at times it has to be maintained that from the graphics
to the gameplay, Respawn have done a fantastic job as well as ensuring that it
is as balanced and bug free as possible for release, and apart from a few
hiccups here and there I am pleased to see that they have done an excellent job
with it all – that being said however, the Origin token system has much to be
desired but I’ll talk about that later on.
Taking the
side of ether the Militia or the IMC you will find yourself dropped into
fast paced 6v6 combat armed with 3 weapons (a primary, a side-arm and an
Anti-Titan weapon), a tactical ability (i.e. a cloak or a “stim” to make you
run faster), a few grenades and 2 kits that effect certain aspects of your
Titan. Unsurprisingly, Titans won’t drop into the match immediately unless the
player has a burn card they can use, (more about them in a bit) which leaves
you to take out the enemy in any way possible as you jump over walls and run
across rooftops as if you’re in some futuristic version of Assassin’s Creed,
and though many people have complained that the 12 player cap is much too small
it also has to be remembered that you won’t be short of enemy’s to shoot as the
game will be constantly spawning in enemy grunts and spectres for you to kill in
an effort to shorten the build time (cooldown) on your Titan. Once the cooldown
period ends however your Titan will unlock and you can call for a Titanfall
which will, as the name suggests, drop your Titan into the map allowing you to
start taking down enemy Titans, grunts and spectres with ease.
As for the AI enemies
of the game (Grunts & Spectres) I will concede to the general consensus
that they are incredibly dumb but I also want you all to bear in mind that AI
enemies are supposed to be dumb in
comparison to the Pilots – as explained in the in-game dialogue you can hear
from the grunts as they run through the map. To put it simply you are basically
a Jedi Masters and they are Stormtroopers (or you are the Master Chief and they
are Grunts – if you want to go all Halo on this analogy). As for the Spectres,
the only analogy I can think of them is that they are the Geth or Husks from
Mass Effect and as such they are quite deadly if you are not careful but
otherwise they’re no threat. All in all though the AI opponents are more akin
to Creeps from League of Legends over anything else. They’re to help influence
the flow of the battle and to help the players get a foothold over their
opponents but otherwise they’re pretty much non-consequential.
Graphically
Titanfall holds up exceptionally well with some of the best graphics I’ve seen
in a while. All the game textures are well done with some very nice effects
implemented to certain assets such as the Titan weapons, shields and both
Titanfall styles; be the Titans dropping in from orbit or phased in and half
dropped via a transwarp drop. It also appears that some extra care has been
taken with the explosion effects and the character models – though that may
just be my opinion. And as for the Titan designs, I was blow away by the detail
on them as it seems Respawn haven’t missed a thing with the detailing.
As
for the Audio of Titanfall. The sound assets are well done and it’s nice to
have actually have music clearly playing in the multiplayer as, to me, music
always adds something more to multiplayer matches than just make them feel
better. That being said however I can’t help but feel the soundtrack is lacking
slightly. Not that it’s a bad
soundtrack by any stretch, but rather I just feel that they could have done something
more “epic” with the compositions, but that’s just my feeling on the matter.
Keeping it to fact however, the soundtrack for Titanfall is just as good as
that of many games I’ve played and leaps
ahead of the soundtrack to BF4 – then again I think that a grenade going off
next to my ear is more present that most of the BF4 soundtrack so take from
that what you will.
Next
we have gameplay and once again Respawn have done an amazing job with it.
Taking the standard FPS formula that we have all seen many times before, Respawn
have turned it into something truly spectacular.
Starting off
with the Pilots (the player character, if you haven’t figured it out already)
we see a flawless integration of parkour mechanics into the classic FPS
gameplay (much like Brink, only this time it works) which has literally added
an entirely new dimension of gameplay as players can now wall run, double jump,
ledge climb and wall jump (a la Prince of Persia/Mirror’s Edge style) across
the maps and as such has opened up a new freedom not often seen in these kinds
of games. Rather than being locked down to the ground the player can now jump
and climb which leads to some quite intense rooftop chases or clashes on narrow
ledges as well as insane amounts of vertical movement, as well diagonal
movement, throughout maps which, naturally, equates to some truly epic moments
than you would never see in other twitch shooters such as CoD. It doesn’t stop
there however as we also see the implementation of zip-line and hacking
mechanics. These unfortunately fall by the way-side though and seem to be
relatively underutilised in matches short of hacking turrets or turning enemy
spectres upon their own team. Hopefully this will be rectified in future DLC though.
Maybe something with a lockdown feel to it where the map changes depending on
who has control of a central mainframe or large security mechs walking around
the map that players can hack to turn on their opponents. That aside however,
the Pilot gameplay is very solid and done extraordinarily
well while also bringing a new and fresh twist to a stale genre, and I
personally can’t wait to see what Respawn will have for us in the sequel.
Moving
on we have the second part of the player controlled combat (and it’s not often
that I get to say that…or ever for
that matter) in the form of the Titans and ohhh
how I love the Titans. There
really isn’t anything quite as satisfying as calling in a mech and watching it
drop in from orbit (and if you’re lucky, straight onto the heads of any
unsuspecting enemies beneath) before clambering in and shooting up the map with
high powered weapons. Alternatively though you could set your Titan to ‘follow’
or ‘guard’ mode and leave the AI to do the work while you pick out an enemy
pilot hiding in a building, capturing an enemy checkpoint or even double team
an enemy Titan. That said however, the
Titans aren’t without their flaws; they’re slow, cumbersome, have a tendency to
get un-done by scenery or friendly Titans if the player isn’t aware of their
surroundings or if they are in a narrow section of the map. Titans are also very
susceptible to Pilots who are quicker, smaller, can hide in building and have
the capability do insane amounts of damage to a Titan if they can get on the
Titans back where the Pilot can promptly shoot up its insides, once again showing
us just how balanced Respawn have made this game. How? Because even though they
have made the Titans powerful they have also made them vulnerable which means
that the team with the most Titans on the field won’t be unstoppable – or at
the very least the losing team will have a better chance of pulling the game
back. Another brilliant addition that I should also mention before I move on is
that the Titans AI is a brilliant little tool when working alongside the Titans
pilot as the AI will give you a constant stream of feedback and warnings over
the battlefield conditions such as when you are under fire from an enemy Titan,
when an enemy Titan is dropping in nearby, when an enemy has a lock-on to you
(be they a Pilot or a Titan), when you are taking damage or even alerting you
to when you are facing off against 3 Titans at once. Though when given full
control of the Titan the AI is useless when put up against a player or a player
controlled Titan, though this fine as it always should be that the player has
an edge over an AI. In addition I have one minor complaint, and that is the
lack of customizability you have for your Titan (and Pilot for that matter) as
your Titan is supposed to be your shadow, an extension of yourself, but at
present they feel nothing short of a disposable tool. What Respawn really needs
to do for the next game (or patch if they’re feeling generous), in my opinion
at least, is to add some more customizability. Something that allows you as the
player to make that Titan yours and shows that you and it are partners rather
than just a bland mass production job (though a nice looking mass production
job at least…still bland though). That complaint aside however, Respawn have
once again done a fantastic job in not only the design of this game but also in
the way that they have blended both the Pilot and Titan combat seamlessly, allowing
the player to jump between fast paced twitch-shooter action and full-fledged
mech combat fluidly without having to drop out of the action – not an easy feat
by any means.
As
for general design of the game, the maps are very well designed with many
different paths for players to take as they try to get those ever important
kills. This is opened up even more when we take into account the parkour
ability that Respawn has so very kindly given players as the maps have
defiantly been made with the parkour mechanic in mind as every wall is
runnable, every rooftop reachable, and every ledge climbable with mass
combinations to be made from all of them. And as you might expect, this opens
up a vast amounts of gameplay options such literally jumping from wall to wall
taking out grunts and Pilots before climbing up onto a rooftop and stealth
killing an enemy sniper. However it seems that the parkour mechanic isn’t the
only thing the designers had in mind when making the maps though as the maps
have also been designed with the Titans in mind. This leads to obstacles for
players to overcome or even use to their advantage such as narrow streets which
bottleneck Titans, wide open areas for Titan vs Titan battles, enclosed areas
that will leave a Titan exposed to enemy Pilots hiding on rooftops and standard
streets for Titans to have a good old fashioned shoot-out in while using the
nearby buildings as cover.
Mentioning the
buildings though, I do have one complaint about the level design and that is
the distinct lack of destructibility. Now when I say “destructibility” I don’t
mean on the levels of Battlefield where you can fell entire buildings with a
few tank shells, as all that would happen there is player’s would end up
levelling the entire map the moment the Titans are up in order to eradicate any
cover for the enemy. What I rather mean is a balanced level of destructibility
where maybe a building here and there could be knocked down to open up a
short-cut or two or maybe even a form of Battlefields “Levolution” system,
where you can shoot a ship out of the sky or collapse an underground structure
which will change the layout of the map; forcing players to come up with new
strategies and play styles, or maybe even the ability to knock out the wildlife
defences for a map so the alien creatures start swooping in and killing Pilot
and AI alike as Titans start shooting them down in order to protect their team
mates. I suppose that will all be in the hands of Respawn though and though it
would be nice to see it, whether it will ever make its way into the game is yet
to be seen – would be nice though.
Moving onto
the progression system for Titanfall, all I really have to say about it is that
it’s rather generic. It’s pretty much the same story as all other games of its
type. You gain a level, you unlock an item and then repeat. It’s also here that
you can see some of Respawns heritage as a former Call of Duty developer shine
through as they have taken a leaf straight out of CoD’s book with its
“Generation” system, a practical carbon copy of the “Prestige” system found in Call
of Duty’s multiplayer. I will give Respawn their dues though as they have tried
to add a bit more spark to it in the form of challenges which players can complete
to earn extra XP and better burn cards.
Now some of
you may ask, “what are burn cards?”, well many Call of Duty fan boys would have
you believe that they are just a copy of Call of Duty’s kill streak system but
believe me when I say that these are anything but - heck if anything I’d say they’re,
arguably, a much better system by far. In the Kill Streak system you can call
in one of 3 set kill streaks depending on how many kills you get in a row
without dying, which in itself is fine but they usually only go to the seasoned
players who can rack up the kills. Burn cards on the other hand are much more
diverse and much more accessible to all
players as you can use a burn card whenever you die – this in turn opens up the
burn cards to everyone in the game
rather than just the players with the faster reflexes. On top of this there is
much more variance in the burn card system with cards ranging from a Wi-Fi
virus to automatically hack enemy Spectres to cards that cut-down the build
time on your Titan. There is also a bit of strategy to the use of burn cards as
well, as you can only use a burn card once, after that it’s gone for good. Players
are also limited to 3 cards a match which means if a player burns though all 3 of
their cards in the first half of a match then they will have no burn cards to
use until they next enter the game lobby where they are able to refill their
slots. It is though this that the burn
cards add another layer of depth to Titanfalls gameplay as well as, once again,
aiding to the balanced nature of the game.
As
for the campaign of Titanfall I have to shake my head and simply ask ‘what
campaign?’ because I sure don’t see one. What I do see however is a mode that’s
called “Multiplayer Campaign” but all
I get in there is a bunch of random in-game characters having conversations about nonsense as I play
though a multiplayer map – in all honesty I might as well have been playing a
Call of Duty game on Xbox for all its worth.
The
campaign, if can be called that, can be summed up as simply as it being several
matches of Attrition (team deathmatch) and Hardpoint (capture the flag). And
that’s it, short of some loosely connected dialogue and an explanation of what you
are there to do, that’s all 9 levels of the campaign. 9 maps interlaced with a
bit of story that basically acts as one big intro to the games multiplayer
maps.
As for the
characters, they’re never properly introduced or fully developed. All we ever actually
see of them is an animated avatar on the in-game HUD or the sound of them
chatting away in the pre-game lobby or over your characters comm. system only
to be blocked out by the sound of someone on push-to-talk in the lobby or
in-game sounds while you’re running around the map – heck I can’t even remember
their names most of the time which goes to show how little the game actually
cares about its characters (and by extension, how little it makes you care about them). Oh, and the final
mission of the game is one of the most anticlimactic missions I have ever had
the misfortune of playing as well as being completely beyond a joke. In fact it
goes beyond the realms of just being anticlimactic and into the dangerous
territory of being bloody stupid with no connection to the previous mission before
it, (ironically called “Endgame”) where you were in an all or nothing scenario
in an epic desert battle to decide the future of the Frontier and its people. And then the game has you attacking a
robotics factory for no other reason than “death to the machines”, which brings
this last mission very close to the “WTF” levels that Call of Duty: Ghosts reached
with its epilogue. Not that any of this matters however as no matter whether
you win or lose a match in the campaign it’s
the game who says whether you won or lost - no matter how badly you may or may
not have beaten your opponents into the dirt. This brings me onto another
problem with the campaign, it’s so overly scripted that it makes the players
actions feel inconsequential which is something a game should NEVER do. If you want to make a good
game you make the player feel like they have made a difference, make them feel
like they have helped to change the world for better or for worse, you do NOT make them feel like they don’t
matter, like they never made a defiance, because that just defeats the object
of the matter and there should be NO
excuse, especially here, especially considering that you, Respawn, you where the team behind Call of Duty
4, one of my favourite game of all time, a game that had one of the best campaigns I’ve
ever played and yet hear you are with this lame, half-arse and utterly pitiful
excuse of a campaign mode. You need to get your act together Respawn, ether
make a good campaign or don’t make one at all because as it stands there are
too many studios making half-arsed FPS campaigns in the world, we don’t need another one.
As
it stands then my opinion of the Titanfall campaign is a bad one. It’s not
good, it’s not well written and the characters may as well have been rocks for
the amount of development they got. The entire thing is nothing but bare bones with a pointless story that
goes nowhere. And as a final cherry on the top, the campaign is only 4 HOURS LONG! Or rather the campaign is
just under 2 hours long but you have to play though it twice if you want to
unlock all of the Titan classes because, you know, what could be more fun than
playing a rubbish campaign once when you can play though it a second time as
the Titanfall equivalent of the Empire from Star Wars.
And
now we come to my final verdict on the game and I can’t help think this one is
going to be much harder than any of the games I’ve reviewed so far.
If
we take Titanfall on its core gameplay alone then we have an amazing game with
some brilliant graphics and a decent soundtrack. We also have a brilliant
amount of innovation, which is a dangerous thing for a game to do these days,
and on top of it all we have one of the most balanced games I have ever played
with the fine tuning of a scientific instrument.
Unfortunately
though we also have to consider the darker side to this game as well. For all
of the good things about this game I have to also take into consideration the awful campaign mode - and though it
hurts me to do this to such an amazing game I can’t just let that glaring error
go. Sadly for Titanfall though that is not my only major compliant as, much
like many EA games released recently, the state of the servers must also be
considered.
Now Titanfall is not Battlefield 4, the game
is bug free for the most part and the servers hold steady and run fine, or at
least they have for me, but there
have also been a lot of people who have been disconnected while in game because
of the EA token system and I myself have been locked out of the game before
because the Origin servers refused to acknowledge my own token. Now as far as
problems go with EA’s Origin servers this is a fairly small one but as I have
said before, I would be a pretty shoddy reviewer if I didn’t take it into
consideration when handing down my final verdict, and as such I must show
Titanfall some tough love in this instance.
With that
being said however I do see a future for this game and I have to just take a
moment to applaud Respawn for this game as to do what they have done as a newly
formed studio is really something to behold and If Respawn pull their finger
out next time and do a stronger campaign (or even omit it completely from the
game in order to work on improvements to the multiplayer) with more fleshing
out on the fantastic core mechanics that have made this game so strong then I
can honestly say that Call of Duty and Battlefield will have to start watching
their backs.
And with all that said I hereby
give Titanfall a harsh but fair…
7/10 – Great
And with that
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am the Guardian and I thank you dearly for reading.
Goodbye and be safe.
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