Titanfall 2 review

Respawn is still a relatively new studio, but its legacy can be found in the modern first person shooter in all its forms – from Medal of Honor to Modern Warfare and then, finally, to Titanfall. There’s a through line there that’s clear to see when you embark on Titanfall 2’s brief but sumptuous campaign. The heritage of a studio that effectively created the cinematic shooter, that married that with spectacle and storytelling in Modern Warfare, and now has been afforded the opportunity to build an FPS campaign around the rarest of things in this genre – ideas.

Titanfall 2Publisher: EADeveloper: RespawnPlatform: Reviewed on PCAvailability: Out now on PS4, Xbox One and PC

For five or so hours, Respawn assaults you with concepts, with gameplay systems and with strokes of design ingenuity, never relenting until you hit the end credits. And then it’s done. A close friend of mine, having finished the single-player, described it as a mic-drop (a line so good I was furious I hadn’t thought of it myself) – it’s Respawn’s statement on what it is capable of as a studio, and just how far the first-person shooter campaign has been going in recent years.

So what exactly are you doing in this five-hour stretch of glorious action, then? Well, it’s no surprise to find out that you’ll be doing a lot of shooting, a lot of wall-running, and, yes, a fair amount of Titan-hopping, but these merely form the foundation of Titanfall 2; they all serve to prop up the high-minded ideas that sideswipe you like an errant left hook from a flailing giant robot.

To actually go into detail about the specific gameplay tricks and one-shot gimmicks that Titanfall 2 employs would be doing an injustice to anyone looking forward to ploughing through the game, but the one constant that ran through my mind as I played was ‘this is like a Nintendo game’. Or, should that be, a Nintendo game developed by the hands and minds behind Call Of Duty at its finest.

Like the best Mario games, Titanfall 2 picks a trick, themes an entire level around it, and then drops it the second it threatens to become overfamiliar. And just like Mario, it’s all backed up by those rock-solid fundamentals that mean when you are just in firefights, or are asked to navigate a chasm using wall-running, everything feels nigh-on flawless.