Review: Titanfall

Ever since I first saw footage of Titanfall I had been excitedly standing by for a chance to play it. When a friend of mine got access to the beta on his Xbox One I went over to his place and tried it out. It did not take long for me to realize that Titanfall was not as incredible as I had expected it to be. Still though, when the game came out I bought an Xbox One Titanfall bundle and hoped that more time with the full experience would prove better. It did, but not as much as I would have liked.

Everything in Titanfall feels like it could have been expanded upon. The so-called campaign is just a series of nine multiplayer matches, one on each of the game’s nine maps, with about 90 seconds of voiceovers beforehand when you are picking your loadouts and some more sprinkled throughout the match. The story that Titanfall tries to tell does very little to engage you and feels incredibly contrived and rushed. There is only one mission (mission 8) where I felt they had woven the narrative into the match in a way that was interesting. For the most part, the campaign only serves as a way to pick which map you want to play on as there is no map voting system in multiplayer. However, even in this regard the campaign is a failure because each campaign level has an assigned game type preventing you from picking the game type you want to play on the map you like.

            The maps themselves ultimately don’t stand out that much though. They are nice looking when you stop and actually examine them, but the gameplay is so fast paced and you move so quickly with your sprint, double jump and wall-run/climb abilities you miss most of the details. There was one map where I had played on it at least 20 times before noticing that there is a massive ship in the background by the docks. Another distinctive characteristic of one map is that there are flying monsters in it. Unfortunately this is another instance of Titanfall coming-up short. They introduce “dangerous” wildlife, but they can’t hurt you and they don’t even get in your way. Instead they just fly away like pigeons when you show up. The only thing they do that is even remotely interesting the first time you see it is at the end of the match when they swoop down and snatch up the AI troops of the losing team.

            Titanfall has a number of small flourishes like this throughout the game. Another example is that you occasionally find a lone AI on each team engaged in a special animation, such as a Spector (robot soldier) picking up a human soldier and breaking his back over his knee. These things look cool upon first glance, but sense you can’t activate any of those special close quarters kills yourself and they can’t happen to you they are rather pointless.

            Titanfall is very focused on making your multiplayer matches feel like they have more going on in them than the usual fare. The one way that this goal actually manages to improve your gameplay experience is through the inclusion of AI soldiers. The AI units are numerous and very incapable; they are basically just fodder. This may sound like a bad thing (dumb AI) but it is actually why they work so well. The maps are fairly large, which allows you to make use of your traversal abilities and have everyone fit their Titans in comfortably. However, because of this if there were only the 6 players on each team the maps would feel rather empty. The AI serves as a way of keeping the action rolling as you move around the map. It also allows less skilled players to contribute to the game’s standard deathmatch type called Attrition as they can go around killing AI rather than players (player kills are worth 4x as much as AI kills in order to balance the two).

Another part of Titanfall that the developers nailed is your character’s speed and maneuverability. It is remarkably fun to wiz through your surroundings in Titanfall. Your double jump and wall-running/climbing also makes you think vertically and gives you numerous ways to get to different positions and go after your enemies. You aren’t forced to head up a set of stairs into a death-trap of an enemy waiting to shoot at you. Instead, you can drop down from the roof or leap in through one of the windows.

            Now obviously there is another big aspect of Titanfall that is meant to set it apart from its competitors, and that is the Titans. At the beginning of each match there is a timer displaying how long you have until your Titan is ready, which you can shave time off of by damaging opponents. So long as you arrive at or around the beginning of a match you are essentially guaranteed at least one Titan. Titans offer a fun change up to the action as they are obviously far more powerful than pilots. That is not to say pilots are powerless against them though. In fact you have multiple ways to fight back against Titans. You have an anti-Titan weapon, which can do a lot of damage so long as you stay out of sight and can be a great help when there is a friendly Titan distracting your opponent. Another option is to try and board enemy titans, which can be dangerous as it requires going right at the Titan. 

            Obviously the simplest way to take down a Titan is to pilot one of your own, but if you don’t consider yourself very good at Titan piloting then you can still make your Titans useful by having the AI takeover them.  That way your opponent has to focus primarily on your AI Titan as you bring it down with the previous two methods. You can also set your Titan to hold a position, which comes in handy in objective-based game types. Overall Respawn Entertainment did a surprisingly good job of balancing Titans against pilots and giving them a number of different uses. Unfortunately, as this is the running theme with Titanfall, even the Titans feel like they are missing things. There are only 3 possible Titans (one is faster with less armor, one is slower with more armor and one is in the middle of each stat) each with their own distinct Titan Core ability, but that 1 ability is all that really sets them apart as they don’t feel that different when you use them and they all have access to the same secondary abilities and weapons. I expected to be able to take parts from each Titan and build my own custom one or at the very least give it a cool paint job and swap out parts for cosmetic purposes, so that is stands out in some way and isn’t just another big gray mech walking around. I expected too much on both accounts.

Titanfall is a fun multiplayer game, but one that feels incomplete. When the game launched you couldn’t even create custom lobbies to play in with just your friends. There is no single player and the so-called “campaign” is a joke. If you are a fan of multiplayer shooters then you should consider Titanfall as it is one of the better ones I have played, but if you aren’t already this isn’t likely to make you one and there are better games to start with. I had high expectations for Titanfall and despite being a good game, it failed to meet just about all of them.

Score: 3/5

Review: Need For Speed: Rivals

*Note: This review is based on my experience with the Xbox 360 version of the game. I felt I should put this because I experienced a number of technical issues with the game and it is possible that the next-gen version isn’t as buggy.

            I’m not a big fan of racing games. It is rather rare that I actually decide to play one, but on the occasions that I do I always go for arcade racers over simulation ones. I enjoy going insanely fast and being on the verge of losing control while also slamming into the guy beside me in the hopes that he will wipe out. My two favorite racing games are Burnout 3 and the original Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Ever since Criterion (the studio that made Burnout) took over Need for Speed I have been meaning to try and get back into the series. In a show of how rare I play racing games, I am only now getting around to seeing what they have done with it. Ironically, I was a bit late as Need for Speed Rivals was handled primarily by Ghost Games, with some assistance from Criterion.

            The thing that made me choose Rivals when I held off on Hot Pursuit and the new Most Wanted was the connected world that this game was offering. The idea of doing a race in an open world that just happens to take you by another player who is playing as a cop and then having to pass the computer racers while evading the player controlled cop was really cool. Another interesting possibility brought about by this connected world was two races intersecting and, at least for a time, doubling in size. I really thought that the connected world would lead to higher highs in the game, but instead it simply lead to more frequent lows. If you are playing on a system connected to the internet you have no choice, but to join a connected world (once there you can go into the settings and create a private lobby so you are alone) that can take up to a few minutes to find or create if no one is found. The world holds up to six players, all of which are focused on completing their own individual objectives. I found that being in a world with other players led to some degree of lag about half of the time and being near them often made it much worse. On multiple occasions I tried to bust a player controlled racer and found myself incapable of doing so. The lag made me miss all of my attempts to ram, side-swipe or even land a Pursuit Tech hit because the player had already moved far away from the position I was seeing him in on my screen. I had to disconnect my ethernet cable from my 360 in order to complete the game, since on top of the lag ruining the moment to moment gameplay experience frequent host-migration would screw up the events I was participating in.

            Even when playing offline, NFS: Rivals has its share of technical problems. There are a large number of glitches in the game; such as one area I found (and by found I mean crashed and went flying into) that kills you because it is out of bounds, yet is also a part of the spawning area resulting in an endless cycle of life and death. Other glitches include: the inability to start an event when you drive up to it, starting an event without all of the event vehicles spawning (in a Hot Pursuit as a cop this means the event is unwinnable as you are tasked with busting more racers than are present), the map not providing details on events, the Pursuit Tech ammo counter not dropping or showing that it is reloading even though it is done and lastly, losing control over your vehicle. You read that last one correctly, there have been points where the car won’t start when I press RT and others where the controls stop working while I am driving and strangely even moving in different directions from where I have my analog stick positioned.

            When the game is working and you are racing against the AI or trying to bust them there is fun to be had. The cars control well and have a nice weight to them making the impacts satisfying, but the game isn’t exceptional in either of these regards (or any other really). There are abilities called Pursuit Tech that you can use, which adds some variety from the Kart Racing genre to the experience, but they are not as creative or fun as what you would find in something like Mario Kart. Unfortunately I feel like open world racing games suffer from feeling too repetitive as you are going through the same environment over and over again and the events would be more enjoyable if they were on specifically tailored tracks as opposed to sections of a larger area. This would also allow for new places to open up and excite the player later on in the game.

Another thing that usually excites the player as they progress is the new cars that they unlock. Rivals has a lot of cars, but unfortunately the game basically discourages you from trying them all out. Every time you unlock a new car as a racer you not only have to pay for the car, you have to pay for all the stat and even Pursuit Tech upgrades that go with it. Your fully upgraded starting car is better than the majority of unlockable cars’ starting stats making the investment necessary to put them above your starting car seem like a waste. I kept my starting car until I was a few events from the end because I figured I would need a better car and had unlocked one of the best in the game at this point. Unfortunately, I was wrong because the enemy cars are determined by the vehicle you drive. This means that picking a faster car made my opponents get faster cars, thus eliminating any sort of edge I hoped to gain. This also means that it is a totally viable option to stick with your starting vehicle forever. The only problem is that certain Hard level events will be more challenging because better cars also have better levels of Pursuit Tech. Like I said though, I was able to get near the end before deciding I wanted a better car, as opposed to finding I needed it.

            At its core Need For Speed: Rivals is a good racing game, but not a great one. Unfortunately, that core experience is hampered by a variety of technical and design issues. It is a real shame that the connected world, which what was supposed to be Rival’s biggest asset, not only failed to offer anything of value, but managed to hold back and disrupt the experience of playing it. Even if you are a fan of racing games I think it would be best to just pass this one by.

            Score: 2/5