Every time I playTitanfall 2, I’m struck by how many ideas its campaign has, when all it really needed to do was exist. Eight years after release,Respawnhas firmly established itself as a developer of single-player games likeStar Wars Jedi: Fallen OrderandSurvivor. That makes it easy to forget that the firstTitanfallgame was exclusively multiplayer at a time when that wasn’t really something that triple-A games did.
Single-Player Brilliance In The Sequel To A Multiplayer-Only Game
In the wake ofOverwatch’s success, we live in a world where most games pick a lane, offering either a robust multiplayer experience or a beefy single-player campaign. When Titanfall came out, that transition hadn’t yet happened and the game, while well-liked, was criticized for Respawn’s decision to skip the campaign.
So, when Titanfall 2 came out, it would have been logical to expect its single-player to be perfunctory; a box being checked to avoid the same bad press. Players and press alike were surprised when, instead, Respawn delivered the best FPS campaign sinceHalf-Life 2. Titanfall 2 has plenty in common with that titan (see what I did there?) of the shooter space. The most salient commonality is that both have levels with big, unique ideas that are executed well, often flawlessly, then discarded to move on to the next thing. Think of Gordon Freeman’s cinematic introduction to the fascisticCity 17, his horror-inflected foray intoRavenholm, or his lonely road trip along Highway 17.
The Crowning Achievement Of Titanfall 2
These are apex predator video games, always on the hunt for the next meal, which they quickly devour before chasing down their next victim. That’s a violent image, but both Titanfall 2 and Half-Life 2 have the singular focus of a shark in motion. That tends to be the attribute that defines great linear games. Titanfall 2 embodies this ethos with its “Effect and Cause” mission, which gives you a device that allows you to bounce between the present and the past at the press of a button. It builds on this in extremely cool ways, having you fight enemies in multiple timelines, swapping to the past to outflank an enemy in the present, and vice versa. It also has you wall run across timelines, hopping from a wall in the past to a wall in the present to cross a fiery chasm.
“Effect and Cause” is the most famous level in the game for a reason, but Titanfall 2 has other ideas that it builds on and abandons just as skillfully. The “Into the Abyss” level, in which your pilot, Jack Cooper, must follow a prefabricated house as it makes its way along the assembly line, is equally memorable. Even when the game isn’t doing something quite as high concept, it still executes it in memorable ways. My favorite level on this recent playthrough was Cooper’s early quest through the jungle to find batteries to power his Titan, BT, back up. It’s an extremely well-made intro level that brilliantly tutorializes all of the game’s key mechanics.
Though triple-A games have increasingly trended toward bloat, really great developers know how important it is to get out before players get sick of something. Imagine ifRemedyhad attempted to integrateAlan Wake 2’s “We Sing” chapter into the entirety of the game, with musical interludes every chapter. It’s possible it could have iterated on it in cool ways, but it’s more likely it would have overstayed its welcome. You can’t build the whole plane out of the black box. The game would never take flight.
