Titanfall 2

The first Titanfall felt like a prototype: a great prototype, but a prototype nonetheless. It had a bizarre campaign carelessly thrown inside multiplayer battles and, despite building a solid gameplay foundation, presented nothing that came close to using it to its full potential. It was a barebones game that was bound to become outdated as soon as its sequel launched. Titanfall 2, then, is that sequel, offering the complete package with a creative campaign mode and a more robust multiplayer – even if it could still have gone a step further in some areas.

Titanfall 2’s story is as paper-thin as the first one, for example. We still have the evil IMC – the oppressors – and the good Militia – the rebels – fighting each other. What they are actually fighting for and what they actually stand for are questions considered irrelevant by the narrative, which never tries to delve deep into them: the game just gives some vague bullet points about their motivations and calls it a day. Early on, for example, we hear a character saying that the IMC “thrives on the casual indifference of others. They prey at the downtrodden, inviting them to trade all their freedom for a little security,” but the themes raised here are quickly forgotten – the word “freedom” is just tossed around as a generic, undefined ideal that must be protected at any cost.

The protagonist is Jack Cooper, a bland straight white alpha male soldier who would certainly please Ubisoft’s executives and is part of the Militia, and so fights the IMC, and that’s all that matters for the story. The narrative here is so sparse that the writers feel the need to remind the player of Jack’s ultimate goal not just once, but twice during the final missions. “Just in case you’ve forgotten, you’re killing all these people so that you can save a planet that is important to the Militia from being obliterated by a Death Star or whatever,” Jack’s titan, BT, keeps reminding him.

The story focuses on the relationship between both characters, which develops in an expectedly basic way: they start as awkward companions and eventually become close friends who are able to work seamlessly together. BT’s charm mostly comes from its incapacity to understand some idiomatic expressions and sarcasm, giving serious answers to what are often rhetorical questions. There’s a moment when BT even goes full Terminator 2 and gives a cute thumbs-up to Jack after saving him.

BT becomes Jack’s Titan under extraordinary circumstances. When BT’s original Pilot, Captain Lastimosa, notices he’s about to die – he doesn’t… last very long –, he transfers the rights to his mecha to the only soldier left alive around him, which happens to be Jack. The relationship between Jack and BT, therefore, begins out of desperation – the Titan even refers to Jack just as “Pilot” to cement that professional distance – but… lasts because they grow together and become best pals.

Now, let’s examine the game’s intro. The first lines in Titanfall 2, delivered while a character slaughters a bunch of people, are:

“Of all the things I’ve seen in the battlefields of the Frontier, the Pilot is the true dominant force. Fast and agile. Graceful, yet devastating. Perceptive… resourceful… and relentless. A Pilot sees the world differently. Sheer walls become flanking routes. Pilots fight differently. Experienced in deception and maneuver, even overwhelming odds shift in their favor. But what separates the Pilot from all the grunts and machines on the battlefield is the bond between a Pilot and a Titan. When linked to a Titan, a Pilot can only be stopped by overwhelming force… or an equal. The Frontier has been the only home I’ve ever known. For years, our lands have been destroyed by the IMC, forcefully taking our resources, polluting and destroying our planets and killing us off if we try to resist. Despite recent victories at Demeter and beyond, we have a long way to go before the IMC is defeated. Now I serve as a rifleman in the Militia, fighting to save the Frontier. I’m a long way from becoming a Pilot, but when that day comes I hope I can live up to the honor.”

It starts right out of the bat with a powerful statement about what the game’s story is going to be about: a power fantasy. The Pilot – and, therefore, Jack and the player – is not just one more basic soldier; he is special. He’s described as a force of destruction, something to be reckoned with in the battlefield. The game’s writing is not shy in hammering this theme home: when we complete a later mission, for example, we hear the characters around us saying, “That was impressive, Pilot,” “Those moves were something else,” “You, sir, are one hell of a Pilot.” The game doesn’t want us to simply feel awesome by playing a super-powerful character, it wants to drown us in praise to make sure we’re getting the point.

It’s also interesting that the line “Graceful, yet devastating” is said while a Pilot is shown punching another guy in the face. It sounds like a comedy, but the narration is dead serious.

After establishing how badass a Pilot is, this intro quickly shifts its focus to the Titans. The words “bond” and ‘link” appear, establishing how the relationship with the mecha will be the central point of the story. Then, the narration stops sounding like a company advertisement and Jack finally introduces himself, stating that he’s defending his home from the evil IMC, which is doing all sorts of terrible things to the Frontier.

Finally, the intro ends with “I’m a long way from becoming a Pilot,” which is supposed to function as a teaser of things to come, but it’s just hilarious since the “long way” amounts to just, like, ten minutes into the game.

This opening scene reveals everything there is to know about the story in Titanfall 2: it’s a shallow power fantasy (with bland villains and a white protagonist named Jack) that takes itself too seriously and wants to give us “the feels” by making our buddy Titan a charming robot – and even a bit tragic too.

This is the point where the writing mostly succeeds: it makes the Titan just a bit ambiguous so that we’re not sure if BT is trying to save Jack because they genuinely care about him or if it’s simply because that is what they’re programmed to do – or even a mix of both. The Titan repeats the directive “to protect the Pilot” throughout the game, which would make one believe they’re just doing what they’re programmed to do, but the delivery by voice actor Glenn Steinbaum is so heartfelt that it makes anyone wonder if BT is not just stating their directives as a way to cover-up their genuine feelings toward Jack, using their programming to justify their behavior without having to outright expose their feelings: even in the scene in which it responds if they “love” Jack, BT uses statistics and neutral reasoning to arrive at an answer.

The game, however, ends on an anticlimactic note, as the generic main villain (spoilers, just skip to the next paragraph to avoid them) doesn’t get his comeuppance, but instead just sticks a note with the word “Apex” on the player’s screen – which refers to an obscure group in the game’s lore and/or is just a foreshadowing for the developers’ following game, Apex Legends. Either way, the player is left out without the final climactic battle that the whole game was building up to, which is a shame.

By the way, while the main threat is the IMC, the main antagonists are just mercenaries who are working for them. This distinction is, however, irrelevant since it doesn’t change anything: they are still just bad guys who appear out of nowhere, guns blazing, at the end of some levels, and go out with a whimper. Some of them have a striking design – like wearing a strange mask – but at the end of the day they are still just bland, boring villains.

It’s a pity that the game’s story is not that great, as the level design in the campaign is truly stellar. In a way, Titanfall 2 feels more like a Nintendo game in the vein of Super Mario 3D World, with its penchant for testing new ideas at every turn, than like a common FPS, such as the current Call of Dutys and Battlefields.

Nowhere this is made clearer than with what is Titanfall 2 best level: “Effect and Cause”. The mission is built around time travel – a theme playfully displayed in its title – and has Jack finding a device that sends him into the past with a simple press of a button, which makes the environment drastically change.  In the present, we are in a devastated area dominated by alien wildlife – the mission even begins with a Jurassic Park moment as Jack stumbles upon a sort of pterodactyl that just flies away as the camera pans over burning buildings. In the past, however, we’re inside those same buildings but now when they were at their prime. In the present, the areas are full of hostile beasts; in the past, they’re full of hostile soldiers. This breathes new life into the combat, as we’ll often find ourselves fighting two battles at the same time, switching between past and present to surprise our targets by going around them in the other time period and then switching back. But it affects the platforming, too, as moving between past and present also makes some walls and ledges appear and disappear, as parts of the buildings collapsed in the fires. And when we finish this level, the device stops working and we simply move on to the next set of challenges.

About platforming, Titanfall 2 makes the most of its wall-running and double-jumping with a level design that uses verticality to hide a lot of secrets in hard-to-reach places. It’s unfortunate, however, the fact that these secrets are ultimately irrelevant: they are the usual collectibles that reward the player with just an achievement. The game puts new weapons for our Titan very clearly in the main path during the levels so that we don’t miss them. So, this can leave one wondering if exploration wouldn’t have been more rewarding if instead of useless collectibles, these weapons were the actual secrets hidden in the levels.

About the multiplayer, Titanfall 2 is much like its predecessor, but bigger. It’s still made of fast-paced, chaotic firefights, which constantly produce rushes of adrenaline. Now, however, there are six Titans instead of three, with their unique set of skills and drawbacks, and there are also more weapons, more skills, more maps, more of everything. The changes are few, but some are significant: the Titans’ shield is gone, for example, which means that now every hit they take damages their core. This also means that after climbing an enemy Titan, we can now remove one of its batteries, which we can then use to recover the health bar of any friendly Titan in our team.

In the end, Titanfall 2 certainly represents a step in the right direction by introducing an interesting – if problematic – campaign mode: while its level design far surpasses most genre rivals, its story and narrative remain just as obnoxious. Titanfall 2 certainly accomplishes more than its predecessor, but it also shows it can still get much better and become one of the greats in the genre.

February 25, 2025.