Game Impressions: Titanfall Beta

Developer: Respawn Entertainment

Publisher: EA

Genre: Shooter

Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC

Website: http://www.titanfall.com/

Age Rating: 16+ (PEGI)

Xbox One’s gotten off to a very rocky start. It’s stripped out DRM and not exactly stellar hardware has made it the butt of many online jokes and many of its games aren’t quite as stellar as they could be.

In walks Titanfall, a game with an interesting history as the guys who created it once created the shooter that defined the previous generation of games: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. They were famously ousted by Activision as the series went into it’s downward, annual release spiral and have since started Respawn Entertainment and gotten into bed with EA (because Activision wasn’t bad enough, apparently).

Out of all the games shown for the new systems so far, Titanfall has gained the most attention, probably as it’s a Xbox One exclusive from EA, of all people. Having been invited to the closed Beta (which became an open beta the next day for no apparent reason), I thought I’d give it a go and see what all the hype’s about.

Set sometime in the future (but not far enough for machine guns to be replaced with laser guns), there’s some war that’s not even vaguely explained between the IMC and the Militia and as the Militia look like rag-tag rebels, we can assume the IMC are the villains of the piece.

For all intents and purposes, the two sides are the same with the same weapons available. There’s the standard affair for a twitch based, CoD style shooter of a machine gun, a shot gun, a pistol, a sniper rifle and frag grenades, but things have been shaken up more they first appear.

In a typical military shooter, jumping isn’t a thing. In Titanfall, not only can you jump, you can double jump, clamber up walls and wall run to get to the top of the highest buildings and find excellent spots to survey the battlefield.

From this vantage point, you may be able to see Titans stomping around; huge robots that can be called in by the player to spice up the action on the battlefield. Titans can be summoned into battle after a timer runs out (which can be sped up by killing enemies) and gives the pilot huge amounts of armour and shield, a massive weapon, missiles, a ‘boost’ ability to quickly move and, of course, the opportunity to stomp on any poor unfortunates walking around. Titans are mighty to behold as they stomp past, the ground shaking with each foot step, but once you’re inside them they are really only enhanced versions of what you were on foot.

The Titan’s tricks don’t end with mere firepower. Hop out (or don’t board it in the first place) and you can command it to follow you around or guard an area, from which it’ll automatically engage any nearby enemies. The AI isn’t going to be as effective as you, but it gives a useful option if you need to defend an area or distract a target.

The mighty Titans have weaknesses, of course. While every player has an anti-Titan weapon (either a homing rocket launcher which requires a few seconds to lock on or a heavy machine gun that fires explosive bullets), they can also ‘rodeo’ on the back of a Titan, either to add to a friendly’s fire power or to crack open an enemy’s armour and fire directly into its exposed innards.

Once a Titan’s shield and armour has gone, it enters a ‘doomed’ state where the pilot has a set amount of time to eject before the Titan explodes, firing the pilot a huge distance into the air from which they can land straight back in the fray or find a hiding spot.

Stealth is a viable tactic in Titanfall, helped further with a ‘cloaking device’ you can use for a limited period of time. Added also is a unique weapon in the form of a the ‘Smart Pistol’, which on paper sounds like the most overpowered weapon in any online game, but in practice it’s anything but.

The Smart Pistol acts as a primary weapon, so no back up machine gun, and when an enemy comes into range it will lock onto them, allowing you to put them down quickly without actually aiming. AI controlled Grunt soldiers and robot Spectres that dot the battle field and make the conflict feel bigger take a single hit to kill and you can lock onto several at once, but player controlled Pilots take three hits to kill. Locking on the requires the same amount of time it would take to just shoot them with a machine gun, so you have to take them by surprise to be at your most effective. The lock range is also pathetically short, so you can’t quite camp on a roof top and pick enemies off with the Smart Pistol.

Finally, Titanfall makes use of single use per game perks called Burncards, which allow you to move quicker, get a new weapon or increase the strength of your titan, depending the cards equipped. Used properly, they could be decisive in determining a game’s outcome, though the likes of me would likely end up using them and then immediately getting killed.

There’s three game modes in the beta; Attrition, which is standard Team Deathmatch, Hard Point, which requires the teams to hold three points around the map in order to speed up a counter to victory and Last Titan Standing, where every player starts in a Titan and, as the name says, the last one standing wins. At the end of these game modes, an ‘epilogue’ mode starts in which the losing team has to evacuate to a drop ship while the winning team attempts to stop them and blow up the drop ship as well. When this mode starts, players on both teams get a single life to do what they have to do and any escaping players get additional experience bonuses to go with the usual levelling system these games have.

More game modes are promised in the final game when it comes out in March, as well as more weapons, burncards and Titans to play with.

What won’t change in the final release is the player limit. In an amazing twist I didn’t see coming, the game is restricted to twelve players with six per side in the interest of gameplay. Usually, games like this go for huge numbers so they can proudly display it on the box (see Battlefield 4 and, to a degree, MAG on the PS3), but instead Respawn has taken the choice on a design front, which is nice to see (before anyone argues the Xbox One can’t handle it, remember Quake 2 had a 64 player mod, which was absolute pandemonium when I tried it and ultimately fairly pointless).

There won’t, however, be any form of single player campaign, so if you get Titanfall, all you can do is multiplayer battles which will somehow link into a plot line surrounding the IMC/Militia conflict. I’m not a fan of the CoD style of multiplayer shooter, so I won’t be getting the full game, but it’s a good game to play, judging by the beta and well worth keeping an eye on. Just be wary about EA publishing it.