This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
Like many Xbox One owners I participated in the Titanfall beta last week. I haven’t played an unreleased multiplayer game before it hits retail from home since Halo 3 so I was pretty excited to get my hands on Titanfall after hearing all the positive buzz from IGN and Kotaku. Here are my impressions based on what I played.
Titanfall is for everyone I breathed a sign of relief after competing my first multiplayer match that I wasn’t annihilated every 30 seconds like Call of Duty and that the game is balanced very well. I feel empowered while playing Titanfall and I know I can have a good time even if I’m in last place. The A.I. bots may be dumb, but they reward players with attrition points that speed up access to your Titan deployment and raise your character level so you can get more weapons, burn cards, new pilot and Titan configurations and so on. It’s refreshing how accessible Titanfall is to casual multiplayer FPS fans like myself who don’’t play multiplayer shooter religiously.
Taking down a Titan as a pilot is cooler then stealing a players ghost in Halo 2. Seriously, nose diving from a building on top of enemy titan and taking him down single handily with your gun and leaping to safety is bad ass. And even if your on the receiving side of this or facing a self destruct moment it’s satisfying to parachute out of the cockpit and race to find cover.
Constant movement and no place is a safe haven Titanfall is all about movement and staying in one spot for too soon is a sure-fire way to get destroyed. Luckily, your movement as a pilot is so varied that it’s a blast to jump up on top of buildings, run along walls ,and use your cloaking ability to keep your enemies guessing. Even as a Titan you need to constantly move to replenish your shields and dodge anti Titan weapons to survive. What I love most about the frantic pace of Titanfall is that it helps alleviate boredom and keeps matches exciting.
It’s exhilarating being a Titan Hearing the words “stand by for Titanfall” gets my adrenaline pumping and eager to wreck hell on every enemy I see. I had the best experience with the Titan machine gun configuration, but the quad rocket launcher and other gun variations are cool. It’s really awesome dashing across the battle field and playing cat and mouse matches with other titans and absolutely destroying ground pilots. Equally awesome is the melee move where you yank pilots out of their self-destructing Titan before they try to escape.
Cool tutorial and epilogue sequence Titanfall has an old school tutorial mode similar to Halo and the older Call of Duty games that does a good job if teaching you how the game mechanics work and preps you for online matches by pitting you against A.I. pilots and titans. It works wells and by the time I finished the tutorial sequence I felt more confident to play competitively with other people. Besides the tutorial there’s also a cool epilogue sequence after the end of each match where you and your teammates race to the extraction point before your enemies annihilate you. It’s a cool way to end the game and a unique idea I haven’t seen in FPS before.
Conclusion While I won’t be picking up Titanfall on day one since I don’t typically play multiplayer shooters online — I just never been addicted to them in the long run — I’ll definitely be picking it up when it drops in price, and I can’t wait to see the final version with the rumored monsters. Also playing the beta makes me really want a single player Titanfall game, and I hope Respawn considers it for the inevitable Titanfall 2 I wholeheartedly recommend Titanfall to all FPS fans and think its a welcome breath of fresh air for the genre and will invigorate first person shooters going forward.