This piece may contain spoilers, if you care about surprises in the story don’t go any further.

Introduction

It’s been a little over 24 hours since Titanfall 2 made it’s début and I’ve played quite a bit of it already. As soon as I got home from work I jumped right into the campaign and binged it until completion. I have to say it was really good.

Campaign Impressions

First the bad. It was short; as in 6 hours short. Just as I was really getting into it the game felt as if it ended abruptly leaving some unresolved story lines untied up. To be fair the cliffhanger wasn’t on the levels of the last The Walking Dead season finale but it still feels like I wanted more out of it.

The story had some interesting twists that incorporated new game mechanics that were very cool.

Titanfall 2 may suffer from it’s own success by not delivering more content due to it’s quality. This is reminiscent of Destiny. The level design, the characters, the cut scenes are so good that it makes you crave even more. The further you get into the story, the more your mind wonders what else could be waiting around the next checkpoint. The story had some interesting twists that incorporated new game mechanics that were very cool. Though not entirely original, being able to time-jump in the story was done so masterfully, that using it to complete the story mission was intuitive yet still slightly challenging. Without hand holding you the level design hints at where you need to go without the need for an annoying hud marker blinking at you incessantly. As enemies begin to overwhelm, you quickly decide to jump time only to find more enemies in that world also. The best part of this segment of the story has to be falling to your certain doom only to escape through time at the exact moment before you fall into the fire or get chopped by the spinning fan blades. This story had me thinking against every video game trope that my character should not hurl themselves into certain death to continue the path and yet it seemed like the only way to go, not having any clue what the world would look like on the other side of the time jump.

Story Mechanics

In Titanfall 2 the story is a linear progression composed of cut scene dialog, search and exploration parkour, minion battles, and boss battles.

Titanfall 2 takes a few pages out of Mega Man’s play book.

As you’re making your way through the terrain the audio dialogue introduces you into your next boss. Each boss pilots 1 of the unique Titans each with their own abilities that you later get to equip on your own Titan as you progress through the story. Each boss encounter has a quick introduction that felt alot like you are playing Mega Man. Once you’ve defeated the boss you then get to equip their abilities at any point in the story with the switch of a menu. So if things are too difficult you can always swap to a different load out and try again. One of the best mechanics of the story are how it uses checkpoints. Often times games can make a player very angry by having checkpoints staggered too far apart and making them redo content for what seems like the designer’s amusement more so than actually making the game more challenging. I really appreciated not having to back track too much when I was caught off guard by a crushing platform that was off camera.

Final Thoughts

Titanfall 2’s story mode was more than I expected in terms of plot depth, boss battles, and level exploration. The entire time I was playing I was hooked and couldn’t put it down, wanting to find out what was going to happen next. However, I wanted it go on more. Who knows, maybe in the free DLC they may bring more story content. I haven’t seen anything to suggest this but we’ll see.