If you look back at 2016 when Titanfall 2 released, you’ll see it was amazingly praised and rightly so. But just a few months earlier, the Legion expansion for World of Warcraft released and I was deep in the rabbit hole of leveling classes, completing dungeons, and diving into raids. So it’s no wonder why I missed out on Titanfall 2 when it released, even though I played a demo of it at E3 earlier that year and it had everything the first Titanfall had and more. Now, years later, I finally got a chance to play Titanfall 2 fully, and it’s so good, still.
Titanfall, to me, has one of the most responsive, fun, and precise movement systems in a first-person shooter to date. Titanfall 2 doesn’t change or remove any of that, instead adding new abilities such as a grappling hook for out of the way places, or a cloaking device to get the drop on enemies, and a powerslide that continues momentum. It’s a game where an entire story chapter is set in a level without a floor, yet it’s simple to navigate.
For something so well praised, it’s surprising how short it is. The main campaign of Titanfall 2 clocks in at just about 6 hours, comparatively short compared to most modern first-person shooters. But therein lies one of its strength. A shorter campaign means you spend less time doing filler or fetch missions, and more time focusing on what’s fun. Titanfall 2 is equal parts shooting, movement, and mechs, and at almost no point during the campaign do you spend more time than necessary away from those three.
But what makes Titanfall 2 stand apart from other shooters, and why it will be remembered for years to come is its use of time travel. Time travel isn’t a new idea in video games, but the chapter titled, Effect and Cause, specifically uses it in a way that has never been done before. Instead of splitting the past, present, and future into narrative focus through levels, Titanfall 2 funnels its time travel as a gameplay mechanic, letting you move from the present to the past and back immediately at the push of a button. You can jump from a ledge, leap to the past, grab a ledge and move along a path that wasn’t available to you in the present, before hopping back to the present and continuing. Effectively, it’s like laying two different level maps on top of one another, letting you move between them at will. It’s a crazy idea, but it works so well and immensely satisfying when it lines up in harmony with the other mechanics.
Titanfall 2 is one of those games that you constantly hear over and over again how good it is, but you just never get around to playing. Fix that, play it. In a landscape where first-person shooters don’t quite nail the mechanics they’re going for, or they try to do too much, Titanfall 2 finds a balance between doing just enough and doing it right.
The Trench Run 