Titanfall is one of the most anticipated game releases of the year. Respawn Entertainment’s premier game has enough hype to stop a speeding bullet. Unfortunately we still have to wait until March 11th to get our hands on it but if you need something to hold your Titanfall cravings at bay there’s always the new art book, The Art Of Titanfall to check out.

The Art Of Titanfall was written by Andy McVittie and gives you the opportunity to see what Titanfall has in store for you when it releases. The Art Of Titanfall has all kinds of information about many of the key things most players will look for in this game including locations, weapons, titans, vehicle designs and character and creature art. The Art Of Titanfall is broken up into four different sections each containing early artwork that shows how things have progressed from the inception of Titanfall all the way up to the finished product.

The first section focuses on the three different Titans, the Atlas, the Ogre, the Stryder and their pilots. The early artwork for the Titans shows how much things have advanced from the design phase to the final copy of Titanfall. Titanfall’s early days show that titans had a more open cockpit but as things moved forward the cockpit was changed to a more enclosed area. One of the original cockpit ideas for Titans had a cockpit door that look very reminiscent of the exo-suit from aliens.

The Pilots for the titans are also laid out in this first section. It has art of the random generic pilot you will be seeing as you play through the campaign portion of the game as well as important characters from both the Militia and IMC forces. Aside from these pilots and main characters there is also artwork showing the grunts, specters and marvins you will encounter throughout the game. Regardless of whether its a main character or a helpless marvin a ton of detail is put into these drawings and they look great.

The second section of The Art Of Titanfall focuses on vehicles and weapons. I was surprised to find detailed sketches of tanks and trucks in here. While nothing has been said if these are something we’ll be able to drive the mere fact that they are in this art book shows how much design work goes into making a game like this even for things that we may never use.

Beyond tanks and trucks there are also an assortment of spacecraft check out. Everything from the huge Annapolis spacecraft down to the tiny ships that carry troops to the battlefield are here. The Annapolis and Birmingham spacecrafts seem to get a lot of focus and have some great artwork to show them off. The Birmingham looks especially cool since its shaped like a gun complete with trigger and barrel. The smaller spacecraft like the Goblin and Hornet also get shown off here along with some commercial and construction vehicles that you will see. Just because there’s a war going on that doesn’t mean people don’t still need to build homes and offices.

The other thing we get to take a look at in this section are some of the weapons we’ll get to use. The inspiration for many of the guns seem to have come from fire arms that the military currently use in real life. In fact many of the guns shown in the art book look like something that could technical exist right now with the exception of the Avenger and Arc Cannon. The weapons sections is a little small but the detail put into each gun is amazing.

The third section is the largest portion of this art book and for good reason. This section covers one of the most important areas of the game, the locations. Each location gets a few pages to itself with tons of beautiful artwork. Each place is very different from the last. Angel city for example is a city full of tall bland looking buildings and windows but the few trees with bright pink petals you see add a feeling warmth to the washed out city. On the opposite side of that we have Boneyard Which is a small city that is built under a huge skeleton of a gigantic monster that fell and died there. In the background you can see a living version of one of these behemoths stalking the area around the skeleton. The art work for these location drawing is amazing and full of little things you might not notice if you were playing the game instead of looking at this art book.

The final section of The Art Of Titanfall is a minor one but interesting none the less. This section shows some of the signage that you will find in Titanfall. Things like billboards, posters and business logos are the main part here but there is also an area that shows the construction of a full size Titan that you might have seen pictures of from E3 2013.

The Art Of Titanfall is a great example of how much design work goes into a game. The art book itself is a 192 page hardback and uses high quality paper. All the images are crisp, clear and show tons of detail. For those of you who like to collect video game art books this is definitely not one you would want to pass up.

Score

9/10