Next-Gen Reviews

So, if you’ve played an FPS before you’ll be very familiar with how Titanfall plays. It’s your run-n-gun first-person-shooter, but with a twist. You can free-run (Mirrors Edge style) and at certain points you can take control of a Titan, a massive gun-wielding robot made of the finest metals... Picture Mirrors edge, Call of Duty and a little hint of Lost Planet’s robotness (not a word) and you’ll get what I’m saying.

 

Typically, you will play your very well known game modes from team deathmatch to domination (known as HardPoint) and the team with the most points at the end wins. However, the 15 amazingly-well designed maps will have you running along walls, double-jumping and hanging off the ceiling waiting for the enemy to try their luck.

 

Apart from the obvious enemy, you will also need to be wary of spectres. Spectres will fight for the enemy team as well as your own, and at times can be a huge pain. The spectres are more for show and padding on the maps; by this I mean that the game being 6v6 on massive maps can feel a little empty, but with the spectres added the map starts to feel more occupied, but still not an overall threat. The spectres will shoot you and at times kill you, but you’ll find yourself wasting your time shooting them not knowing whether they are the real enemy or bots, only to be killed by an actual human controlled player. I found this hugely frustrating.

 

After a couple of minutes you can call in your Titan… called Titanfall. You can watch the beast fall from the sky and from here you can get straight in, or, you can instruct it to follow you, guard and area or do nothing and allow it to take its own course. One thing to bare in mind is that the Titan without you in it makes it AI and trust me, the AI ain’t all that.

 

Titans (like the pilots) can be equipped with different loadouts as well as different skeletons. Ranging from a machine gun to a missile launcher, a fast mover to high shielded, there is something for every play-style. On top of this you have special abilities one being the ability to catch the enemies gun fire and throw it back at them.

 

As great as the shield is on the Titan you still will come to your end, and When this happens you will need to eject from the Titan in order to avoid guaranteed death. The eject button throws you out of the cockpit and very high in the air allowing you to jump on an enemy titan and start to kill it, or get to a safer area and start pushing on the objective again.

 

Overall, Titans are very easy to pilot and very fun.

 

Once you’ve got the hang of Titanfall you will given access to burn cards. Burn cards are awarded at the end of the round and give you access to things like extra XP, higher powered weapon and constant cloaking. But, there is a catch! Only one burn card can be active at one time and they only last for one life. I am quite certain that you will find yourself annoyed at spawning and dying very quickly taking with it one of your burn cards. Luckily you get a lot, to the extent where you may be throwing some away.

 

Titanfall is available on both the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One. I played both versions and I am sad to say that only one is worth buying, the Xbox On version.The Xbox One version handles brilliantly with smooth frame-rates, no lag and lovely crisp visuals. The Xbox 360 version has horrendous frame-rate issues which alone make it near-impossible to play. It’s a shame because 360 owners should be given a very similar experience at the worst, but what they actually got was another shoddy port that shouldn’t have been released yet.

 

Overall, if you have an Xbox One, Titanfall offers the overdue need for a fresh and classy FPS that doesn’t do too much differently, but instead, just enough to make you start to love the genre again. The 360 version however, will leave you rage quitting and using your disk as a drinks coaster.

 

I hope to see Titanfall release multiplatform in the future, but until then….. You have to play it, just make sure that it’s on an Xbox One!

 

Xbox One 9/10

Xbox 360 5/10