Titanfall 2 is Made Great by the Details

Titanfall 2 is so good! It’s like crazy how good it is. From the level design to the art direction to the voice acting to the creature design to the best-in-class movement mechanics. I could, and maybe will write about all of these pieces. But right now I want to talk about 2 little details that most people could probably ignore, but made me pause the game in jealousy of the designers when they happened.

The first is in the tutorial, which ends with a time trial called “The Gauntlet”. The Gauntlet tasks you to get to the end of a course and shooting all the targets as quickly as possible. Early in the course we get to this obstacle.

The player has learned that the fastest way to get underneath things is to slide, but they have not been tested on aiming while sliding. This scenario forces the player to combine the 2 skills at once, and do it fast! But what I think is so brilliant about this piece of the tutorial is the enemy placement. Not only are the enemies placed in such a way that challenges the player’s ability to aim in 2 different directions, but they’re also placed in such a way that the player knows exactly where they are as soon as they see the wall to slide under. This gives the player time to feel incredibly smart and cool when they see both targets, realize they can slide then shoot one and then shoot the other before the slide is done and then try to pull it off. And if they’re like me, miss the first shot and sit awkwardly on the ground trying to shoot the first target a few times. But when you do manage to pull it off, it’s a tremendous feeling helped created in no small part thanks to the placements of those targets.

Another little detail that caused me to pause the game wasn’t in the level design, but instead was a smart piece of combat design. First, some background, the game has established that hitting robotic enemies in their glowing red spots does extra damage and has established that grunts can be killed with a single melee attack, at least on the normal difficulty. So, in Level 3 Blood and Rust the campaign introduces a new enemy, the size of a grunt but robotic like a Titan. These robots are called Spectres, they take a lot more damage to stop and they also have glowing red spots. Titanfall 2 is all about moving quickly, so having to put a bunch of bullets into each of these Spectres can slow down the pace of the game. But they have an elegant solution to this problem that not only helps keep the pace of the game fast and makes the player feel really clever when they figure out how to take advantage of it. Hitting spectres with a melee attack spins them 180 degrees putting their big glowing weak spot right where the player can hit it. This bit of simple combat design helps the player keep moving and allowing them to not stop and pour a bunch of bullets into any single enemy.

A Spectre after being hit with a Melee attack

Titanfall 2 has a campaign on the same very high level that the studio’s founders were known for, in no small part thanks to “small” details like these all throughout. The Titanfall 2 campaign is not only full of these details, it also has some of the best first-person movement in the genre, a pace that keeps the player on their toes by introducing all new mechanics and then immediately throwing them away for more new mechanics. These details and high quality throughout show an understanding and care for the FPS campaign, a thing that sometimes feels like a thing of the past, that proves Respawn are some of the best in the business.