Before the Apexes, there were Titans

 Titanfall 2

Released: October 28, 2016

Platforms: Steam, Origin, Playstation 4, Xbox One

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Genre: First Person Multiplayer Shooter

    Before their recent released title Apex Legends, developer Respawn Entertainment released their second game after their founding, Titianfall 2. A first-person shooter with a campaign and standard multiplayer suite, modified with the games theme of pilots and their large mechanized companions Titans.

The game offered a fun and fast gameplay as player's play as pilots who are very nimble. With thrusters and jetpacks, they jump and fly across the terrain above their enemies. AI grunts of generic soldiers also drop in with players as cannon fodder to help make the battlers grander in scale as they make audio cues about their actions to the situation. Players can be armed with an assortment of weapons and gadgets to get them, more points in a match. They also have classes that offer specific perks, like the starting 4 types of pilots, a grapple hook, radar throwing knife, cloak, and speed boost, with 4 more that are unlocked in multiplayer.

As the Battle heats up, players will then call down their Titans from the sky to bring in as bigger guns and damage to turn the tide of a game to their favor. These Titan mechs also range in class offering specific weapon types and abilities associated with their class. Their prescience ratchets things up as players start dropping Titans to deal with each other makes battles both chaotic and fun as a Titans weapons one shot players and their large stature, but slower speeds demands pilots to use their maneuverability to avoid such situations.

    Of course this game has a lot underneath it's mechanics as a key factor is player's skill in the basic parkour system. It offer all player pilots the ability to double jump, slide and wallrun on the stages. 

These two abilities are how many players can zip around a battlefield quickly. If a player is not used to these systems, they will be seen on the ground most of the time when they start, as it is difficult to get used to lining yourself up for a wallrun while making sure you don't get killed. Not using these systems
are designed as detriments to players as their movement speed is slower compared to wallrunning and sliding. Using these abilities along with map knowledge will make a player play better as they can know jump points and window locations to maximize their movement.

The game itself has some other tricks associated to the pilots as some can use the grappling hook pilot to launch themselves further than normal, and same with a gravity grenade. You will also see some players doing bunny hops that are a use of the jump and slide at specific timings to maintain momentum on flat terrain, going potentially faster than wallrunning. Being a multiplayer game that has a bad launch economically that was released in 2016, had a resurgence as of late many of the passionate players are still online and will kick new player butts in maneuverability and general skill as it is possible to never touch the ground an entire match.

There is also the issue of weapon, ability, pilot, and Titan unlocks for new players as some more
interesting gadgets, abilities, and titans are unlocked later in a accounts playtime, such as a complicated final unlocked Titan, Monarch which is complex when used and has an in-match upgrade system to use if players expect themselves to not lose their Titan after their drop.

Also matches don't end in some cases when there is an obvious winning team. Losing side has a chance of extracting to finish a game while winners must prevent them from reaching a drop ship that spawns or shooting it down before the extraction timer ends. 

None of the above multiplayer aspects are completely integrated into the single player campaign but there are aspects of them. It makes things somewhat easier on the player with reduced health enemy titans except for the bosses and doesn't force the player to do the advance movement techniques to get around faster to complete objectives, except for some collectibles. They are also gin a chance to try out all the titan types in modified forms to get some sort of idea on how the loadouts work.

     Game graphics are very impressive with great texture a model work on characters and environments. Both player characters and their Titans have great animations and their movements accentuated by various physics items and doodads attached to them like grenades and canisters.
The great lighting doesn't affect identifying enemies on the screen and have clear telegraphs that help
direct players where to sort of go when they don't know a map. Post processing effects also don't hamper the visual clarity of the game and runs extremely well due to being based on the first Source engine. While it doesn't look like a source engine game Respawn's art and modification to the old engine help give the game modern touches that visually matches the likes of Call of duty and Battlefield games at the time and still hold up today.

    Audio design is excellent with sound effects easily giving proper positional audio to  players about potential threats and opportunities. Gunfire of generic firearms and scfi weapons offer unique sounds that are identifiable even amongst the chaos of an all-out fight with all players in a match. Music is melodies play during match start and end. Then again its great like any other first person shooter on he market as the audio quality is  meant to supplement the player experience. I lacks the bass tones that other games accentuate like recent battlefield entries due to the far off explosions happening in the game. It may seem similar to Call of duty due to their previous experience on the franchise.

    Controlling the character is easy using the common standard of WASD for right handed players. Easy access to the button dedicated for grenades and abilities in easy to reach buttons as the controls are streamlined in a way that doesn't need a lot of button inputs. If you played a popular shooter, then you might as well understand the gist of the basic first person control scheme.

    The single player campaign is a great ride starting with the Training gauntlet mission allowed on Origin platforms to be played while the game is installing to get the player used to pilot controls.

Levels provide great platforming exercises as well as combat encounters that slowly ramp up the need to combine both parkour and shooting. Each also has a gimmick or themes that temporarily alter the platforming or combat sections. and slowly give the player some bits and pieces of the multiplayer component of the game.

    You start as Rifleman Jack Cooper who is being trained on being a Titan Pilot. Part of the Frontier Militia en rout to a planet controlled by the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation. On arrival Jack's mentor dies in combat and passes over his suit and his Titan BT-7274 over to him, from there you play through the journey of Jack Cooper transitioning from Rifleman to Pilot, and gradually bonding with BT.

While generic and plain Jack as a character help facilitate conversations with BT on things about it self. Their usage helps deliver a performance of them gradually knowing each other and defending each other and becoming a team as the story progresses.

    Level both single player and multiplayer are well designed, especially the single player mode. For the campaign there is gimmicks in later levels tied to the way players would need to complete story tasks and each mixup the platforming and engagements a little bit to be uninteresting for as long as they last.
Multiplayer has maps with well defined lanes that players churn through with titans and lots of various setups that allow alot of wall running to get around.

    Overall the game covers the needs for a basic FPS game with their parkour and titanfall mechanics being front and center in the FPS. You could still say that this is a generic FPS package of campaign and multiplayer with the common multiplayer game modes. It's much like the others at the time of release as it was in competition with Battlefield and Call of Duty in its initial release window. Would've been nice if there was a dedicated training room other than the single player gauntlet mission to play around with the learning player controls, but the game sometimes says to just run a private multiplayer match to train and learn map layouts. There also needs to be some sort of Server browser to find games as the only way to play with others is though a matchmaking button. Also that when you play in a room, you sort of stay there instead of every one booted out to the multiplayer menu and search for games again.

    This game is a good recommendations to players who enjoy FPS with fast movement and gameplay. Also for those into giant robot shooters, scfi setting shooters. However at the moment it maybe hard to get immediate matches. While before the player base was not large, it has grown due to an APEX Legends event. The gained popularity and resurgence of the player base has identified a problem with the game servers being DDoS attacked, affecting the matchmaking and exploiting the game's matchmaking system to prevent players from finding games and playing them. While for now the developers have done things to stop it, the community worries about it happening again. Matchmaking also takes a few minutes to get into a every single match due to more players hitting the servers now saying it connected to a game server but then restarts the matchmaking.