Hands On With The Titanfall Beta

At the heart of Titanfall is the Pilot and their Titan, a dynamic which Xbox One and PC owners will be able to experience during the Open Beta starting on Friday.

We got to explore it ahead of time.

Just on their own, the Pilot is superior to the ordinary troops and mechs being sent into by the warring IMC and Militia. They have more advanced weaponry at their disposal, like the auto-aiming Smart Pistol MK5, tactical abilities that can be recharge quickly and do things like cloak you to near invisibility. Their biggest advantage comes from vastly improved mobility thanks to the jetpack.

It takes a while to get used to, and even with a few hours under my belt I was still learning how best to use the jetpack.

It takes a while to get used to, and even with a few hours under my belt I was still learning how best to use the jetpack, but it adds so many possibilities to the way you play a level. Being able to double jump and wall-run has allowed them to create levels with a lot of verticality. You can get to the top of a building in a matter of seconds, rather than having to traipse up stairs for 10 times as long, leading to what can be an even more fluid and fast-paced style of play.

But then there’s the Titans. Coming in three varieties, though only one is in the Beta, they can be called in after a few minutes of gametime. Performing well and getting kills will cut the time you need to wait, before calling in a Titan to come falling out of the sky for you to hop into the cockpit.

There’s a stark contrast as you lose a lot of the mobility, without the ability to jump, pass through smaller passageways or go into buildings, but make up for it with a handy dodge or dash ability, much heavier armour, abilities like the Ordnance shield to send incoming bullets back at your enemy and much heavier weaponry in the first place, as well as a secondary weapon ability that can cover a reload with a hail of missiles. They’re the tanks of this futuristic war.

Because of that contrast, there’s a lot of nuance to the fight, with every Pilot able to dart around quite quickly, making use of the anti-titan weapons they all have, and supporting their friendly Titans in the fight too. A Pilot will die very quickly against a Titan, but working with nearby teammates can see a lone Titan taken down just as fast, though the mech might actually be on auto-pilot, following and supporting a soldier on the ground.

Though you can avoid death by quickly tapping X three times to eject from a doomed titan, sending you high above the battlefield and letting you get a quick picture of the fight around you, you can also pick and spend a selection of Burn Cards before you respawn. Things like an active sonar ping to detect enemies, faster movement or a more powerful weapon. These are earned during play, and picked before a match, but will only last for the duration of your next life.

Across the battlefield you also have the AI units. These fall into two categories, ordinary human Grunts and Spectre mechs, with the latter the hardier of the two and only appearing once the first Titan has dropped. But these aren’t really designed to provide you with any kind of challenge.

They’re closer to endless stream of grunts which you see in League of Legends and Defence of The Ancients, the Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas, and are more a quick source of XP and points or cannon fodder to use as a distraction. They mean that there’s always something to do, but it’s very easy to identify the Pilots either by how they’re acting on the battlefield or with a quick glance to your minimap.

What the AI does is bolster the number of moving parts to a match, when there are only 12 players on these maps. However, that’s not really a bad thing, and because the game has been designed around that player number, I never found myself wanting for real opponents to shoot at. Even with just four players on each team during an Attrition match, the game felt tightly focussed around a single area of battle.

Objective-based modes could actually benefit from this, so that you can actually play to the objective and not find yourself butting up against an impenetrable wall of gunfire, the low player count meaning that you have to stay in motion to control the match and can better flank and outmaneuvre your opponents.

This works in tandem with the maps themselves, and the two in the Beta are nicely contrasting. Angel City provides urban warfare, with tightly packed buildings, lots of interiors and a lot of verticality to the combat. Fracture, by contrast, is more open in design, more freeform. It still has buildings and plenty of places that Titans won’t fit into, constricting their motion, but it’s larger in scale and a different challenge.

In both cases, the maps are quite large, certainly larger than your average Call of Duty map. Depending on the game mode and how the battle is going, it would be easy to play an entire 10 minute match in less than a third of the full map, leaving plenty to see and explore as you learn the ins and outs.

One thing that was noticeable as I played the Xbox One version of the game, was that this was not running at 1080p. Though the art style has some nice moments amidst the gritty far future trappings, there was plenty of aliasing, for example, which came from what I’ve since calculated from captured footage to be an upscaled 1440×810 presentation, or there abouts, roughly 3/4 the number of pixels of Full HD. It’s maybe a little disappointing to not hit 1080p, but does generally deliver on 60 frames per second gameplay that people demand for fast-paced shooters, though I did notice one or two minor hiccups.

The beta also features three game modes, with Attrition your standard Deathmatch-like mode, Hardpoint Domination a domination mode and Last Titan Standing a multi-round single-life elimination mode.

But the last one is different to your usual elimination, in that everyone starts in the Titan. You’ll last a lot longer than if it was just ground pounders, and this leads to longer, but much less tentative engagements. You can also still eject from a doomed titan, and keep fighting on foot, but this mode is about which team’s titan is still standing at the end of it all.

The more traditional elimination style of play comes at the end of Attrition and Hardpoint modes, during the matches Epilogue once a winning team and losing team has been decided. The losers then have to extract, while the winners have to try and wipe them out before they can escape on the transport. Both sides have just a single life to play with, and it adds another simple but quite exhilarating twist to proceedings.

And that’s really what Titanfall is: a long, long list of interesting ideas and twists that takes the core mechanics of an online shooter and really pushes things on to the next level. Just adding the Titans, or the AI cannon fodder, the added mobility, even dropping the pretense of a single player campaign (with a story now to be interwoven with the multiplayer), wouldn’t have differentiated it from the rest of the market anywhere near enough.

Combine all of those things together and Respawn look to have created something that feels fresh and invigorating, which will certainly be one of the first major system sellers and must-have titles for the Xbox One.