So it's been about two weeks since Titanfall came out and I think I've finally settled into it enough to write something coherent about it instead of just yelling "TITAN DROP" at my TV like an idiot.
Quick recap for anyone who's been ignoring the internet: Respawn Entertainment (the studio full of ex-Infinity Ward guys who got pushed out of Call of Duty a few years back) shipped Titanfall on March 11th, exclusive to Xbox One and PC. EA published it, Microsoft threw a genuinely absurd amount of marketing money at it, and for about a month it felt like you couldn't read a gaming site without seeing the word "cloud" attached to a screenshot of a mech stomping on some poor grunt.
I bought an Xbox One more or less specifically for this game, which I realize is a dumb sentence to type out loud. $499 for the console, another $60 for the game, and I did not buy the Titanfall-branded bundle because the white controller looked cheap to me in person at Best Buy. That's a whole separate complaint honestly, white plastic on game controllers ages terribly, mine always end up looking grey and grimy within a couple months no matter what.
Anyway. The actual game.
The wall-running and double-jump stuff is the best movement a shooter has had since I don't even know when. Quake 3 rocket jumping maybe, if we're going back that far. You're a pilot, you can run along walls, chain jumps off them, grapple around a map in about four seconds flat, and then when your Titan timer fills up you call down a forty-foot mech and the whole rhythm of the match flips. Going from tiny fragile human to giant armored death machine and back again is the hook, and it works.
The 6v6 cap is the thing everyone online won't shut up about, and I think everyone online is wrong. There's been endless comment-section arguing that a "next-gen" shooter should support way more players, that 6v6 feels small compared to what Battlefield does. But the maps are stuffed with AI grunts and spectres running around as fodder, so it never actually feels empty, it just feels focused. Adding sixteen more human players onto these particular maps would turn the wall-running into a mess of collisions and third-partying every single gunfight. Respawn clearly built the maps around six a side and I'd rather they nailed that than chased a bigger number for a marketing bullet point.
The cloud server stuff is the part I'm less sold on as a customer, even though I get why Microsoft loves talking about it. Dedicated servers are obviously better than the peer-to-peer nonsense Call of Duty's been running on forever, no argument there. But I've had three matches this week where my connection to whatever Azure datacenter I got routed to was noticeably worse than local peer-to-peer ever was, guy teleporting around, hit markers not registering right. Not constant, just often enough to notice, and once you notice you can't stop noticing.
No PS4 version is obviously the elephant in the room and I keep seeing people online treat that like a personal insult. It's a business decision, not a referendum on your taste. Microsoft paid for timed exclusivity, or maybe permanent exclusivity depending who you believe, and that's just how these deals work now. I don't have strong feelings about it besides mild amusement watching PS4 owners get genuinely upset about not being allowed to give EA sixty more dollars.
Season pass is fifteen bucks for three DLC map packs down the line, which I bought without thinking about it too hard, which is exactly the kind of impulse purchase that got me here with a $499 console in the first place. I have no idea if that turns out to be a good deal yet. Ask me in the fall.
One thing nobody warned me about going in: the campaign, such as it is, is basically just the multiplayer maps with a story draped over them via radio chatter you can barely hear over gunfire. If you bought this expecting anything resembling Call of Duty's single player, you bought the wrong game. I didn't mind, but I went in knowing that already from reading previews back in February.
Two weeks feels early to call this the best shooter of the year but I'm having more fun with it than anything else I've played since November, and I don't say that lightly about a game with no traditional campaign and a roster of maybe fifteen maps at launch.