Titanfall 2 is almost out in the wild, and the reviews have been surfacing over the past few days. To make things easier for you, we’ve collated a bunch of them below.
Coming as it is at the same time as EA’s Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2 may be slipping somewhat under the radar – which is a pity because the critics are saying a lot of good things about a game that, at a glance, could be shrugged off as a mindless sequel full of giant robots and little in the way of fresh ideas. Instead, it looks like developers Respawn have come up with one of the year’s best shooters.
The game will come out on 28 October for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Here’s what people are making of it so far:
GameSpot: 9/10
“Titanfall 2 demonstrates a vitality that its predecessor couldn’t. Whereas the first Titanfall kept up its breakneck pace throughout the entirety of every match, Titanfall 2 understands that sometimes, dialing things back for a few moments can make the long run much more enjoyable. In many ways, Titanfall 2 feels like the game Respawn should have made in 2013. It’s a fantastic sequel. It’s a fluid shooter. It’s a spectacular game.”
IGN: Review in progress
“Playing through the approximately six-hour campaign I was impressed that each level felt big enough for me to sprint, hurdle, double-jump, and wall-run through while also being well enough organized that I never felt lost. It’s linear, but open enough to create an illusion of freedom. Only occasionally was I forced to stop and consult the objective beacon, which is great considering the amount of time I spent dashing through mazes of massive air ducts or across assembly lines big enough to construct entire buildings.”
Polygon: 7/10
“Consistency is a problem for Titanfall 2 in general, and it’s a game that seems to struggle with a confident direction for its changes. The end result is a collection of fantastic mechanics across its campaign and its multiplayer that often feel hamstrung by difficult to understand design choices. There’s clearly more here than before, and the package is offering something more “complete” by today’s standards. But Titanfall 2 throws the series’ dynamics off enough to make for something that just doesn’t quite click together as well as it did before.”
Rolling Stone: No score
“I’m so bored with the thrillride first-person shooter campaign. It was revelatory when Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare first established formula in 2007, but removing a player’s agency only works for so long. With just a little bit of platforming, puzzles, and baseline cognitive engagement, Titanfall 2 feels so much more satisfying than the status quo. Respawn realized the pretty hallways aren’t fun anymore, and I hope the rest of the industry catches up soon.”
GamesRadar: 4.5/5
“Titanfall 2 might well be this year’s best surprise. The original game’s gorgeously tactile, flowing traversal systems always had great potential as the fuel of a single-player campaign, but the care and craft that Respawn has instilled into creating that adventure will blindside you. It’s immediately gratifying on a moment-to-moment basis, but as a complete work and experience, it’s one of the most creative and rewarding FPS in recent memory.”
Digital trends: 4.5/5
“If the first Titanfall was a great concept in an anemic package, Titanfall 2 is that concept honed, expanded and fully realized. It couples a slick, well-made campaign with deep multiplayer to make a shooter experience that’s great all around. Respawn has taken all the best lessons from its first foray in 2014, and it’s all paid off – Titanfall 2 is among the best shooters of the year.”
Previous coverage continues below.
Titanfall 2: Single player campaign and a TV spinoff
In an interview with Forbes, Titanfall 2 lead writer Jesse Stern said Titanfall 2 would feature a dedicated single player campaign. How does the writer envision a story based around giant weaponised mechs will play out? Well, they’re not going to be baking cakes.
“So we are doing our best to deliver a vision of grand global colonial warfare retelling the story of the American Revolution and the American Civil War in space,” Stern told Forbes.
“We imagined the next generation of immigrants moving out to the new frontier of an inhabitable planet. Rather than taking a traditional sci-fi approach to that we wanted to look at how that would happen practically, what the ships would look like and with machines that were designed for excavation and construction, demolition and working the land, and what happens when they are turned into instruments of war.”
Stern has a background in TV writing, having worked on NCIS, and looks to be tapping into this expertise with a series spin-off for Titanfall, in partnership with Lionsgate TV. The game/TV overlap is a method currently being explored by Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break – albeit to mixed receptions. Live-action segments punctuate that particular title, and some have praised this for humanising the game’s villains, while others have called it a baggy mess.
Would Titanfall 2 benefit from a TV equivalent, or would spreading the story across a game and a live-action series make the overall experience cumbersome and undermine the appeal of playing a game?
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