Better Late than Never Review: Titanfall 2

Titanfall 2

Disclaimer: I have barely played any of the Titanfall 2 multiplayer, so my main takeaway from this game has been the single player campaign (played on PC).

So in short: this was the best of the FPS campaigns released last year. Titanfall 2 was good enough that I played through twice, once on PC and again on PS4. The campaign adds a story, a sense of coherence, and a point of existence to the Titanfall franchise that was lacking in the first multiplayer-only game.

The Titanfall 2 game casts you as a soldier aspiring to be a pilot. The pilots are the jockeys who pair up with their sentient robot buddies and kick ass. Presented as technologically savvy and well-equipped super soldiers (sort of) the pilots are a bit like the Spartans of Halo, but not in an augmented way.....they are just very, very good at what they do and use their suit, helm and robot to kick serious ass. Inevitably your soldier is thrust into a scenario forcing him to take on the mantle of pilot, and you get your first robot, BT. BT quickly steals the show as the best robot sidekick, ever.

The storyline involves a world in dispute, a range of suitable badguys for you to take down, and far and away some of the best run and gun gameplay mixed with giant robots that you can get. In fact, this entire package is amazing...it's heads and shoulders above what Call of Duty coughed up in Infinite Warfare, and honestly the next Halo game needs to pay attention to what Titanfall 2 did because it's doing the SF FPS genre better than everyone else.

Sadly I simply felt little to no motivation to get involved in the online multiplayer experience this time around. The single player campaign was so good I played through it twice, but every time I jumped in to the online component I'd play a few rounds and just feel, "m'eh." Maybe I'm getting too old to care or something.

Verdict: Solid A+ for the single player alone. I won't bother to review multiplayer other than to say that it "looked and felt competent, but lacked whatever it is I need to feel motivated to keep playing." Though that said, with my current annoyance at CoD WWII and Star Wars Battlefron II, I might reload Titanfall 2 and give the MP another go. Hmmmm.

Like most games from last year you ought to be able to find this one for $20 or less and at that price it's a steal. I wouldn't bother with the deluxe edition unless you plan on going full multiplayer and like lots of cosmetics and new mechs, though.