2026
By: Alexander Holmes
Titanfall, on its face, is not what you would expect to be sitting at the top of the list for greatest mecha action games of all time.
And yet it is. And while it has garnered that reputation among those who have experienced it, I can’t shake the feeling that it has a lot of factors working against earning that title as a part of its legacy.
First off, is that the story of the game seems inaccessible. Merely by virtue of being a sequel. Titanfall 1's story was a progressively evolving narrative that developed over the course of playing the online, competitive multiplayer. There was no dedicated story mode nor campaign. And, due to a needlessly complex and sordid history, Titanfall 1's story is functionally unplayable at time of writing.
Secondly, the game's developer, Respawn Entertainment, has moved on to the more profitable Battle Royale game Apex Legends. Largely leaving the setting and aesthetics of Titanfall 2 behind. Though with some Easter Eggs.
Lastly, Titanfall 2 is, by some more restrictive mindsets, not a mecha action game.
“Mecha action games have customizable loadouts, and I can zip around shooting homing lasers and do a rocket punch! This is just a first person military shooter.” says the Straw Man.
Titanfall 2 is, in fact, a futuristic, military FPS in the vein of Call of Duty and Battlefield. You're switching guns. Throwing grenades. And using a melee takedown. While taking fire against a health resource that allows for a few hits before death and recharges back to full if you can avoid getting hit for 2 seconds.
Beyond this, however, is a movement kit that truly feels futuristic. Cloaking to cover either an offensive approach or a desperate retreat. Wall running and double jumps string together to boost your momentum. It's smooth and fluid, and gives me the feeling that only games like Warframe or Ghostrunner can give me. But the speed and mobility of the Pilot is beautifully balanced against the real-robot feel of the Titans.
You can feel that this is a mass of metal you are piloting. Movements feel slow, but due to your size you cover far greater distance than as a pilot. Your missiles can take out whole groups of enemy soldiers in a single volley; a feat that would take the pilot 5 to 10 minutes of parkour. Your reflective shield can protect you and retaliate, but is greatly restricted by timing. And the genius decision to only give the mech the ability to dodge.
These fights have weight, timing, and rhythm. The distinction between the two flows of gameplay make running as the pilot and fighting as the Titan entirely distinct.
Not all mech games feature customization, nor does customization necessarily make for good mecha action. Part of the reason why the very first game in this series was Assault Gunner HD and Armored Core. To demonstrate that individual systems don't define the genre. Titanfall's mechs are joining the ranks of Zone of the Enders Delores or Eureka 7. Mechs that aren't just tools, but characters, people, and friends to the protagonists of the story.
Titanfall 2 is the story of Jack Cooper and the Titan BT-7274 on a mission to defeat the IMC, the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, to bring freedom and clean environments back to the people of the Frontier.
The opening mission starts as a training simulation. You're on your way to becoming an official Titan Pilot. And immediately the story does everything in its power to instill in the player the desire to get in the mech.
From describing the neural link for the simulation as similar to, but not quite the same as a Titan. To interrupting the training just before you have the opportunity to board. To making you storm a beachfront without the full movement suite you had as a pilot. To the tragic death of your commanding officer assigning BT to you, even as the Titan and himself are decommissioned. Within the span of 45 minutes, the player feels empowered, disempowered, and desperately trying to rearm themselves while stranded on an alien planet.
It's a masterclass in FPS narratives the likes of which we just don't get anymore in the 2020s.
Each segment is fast and punchy. A lack of cover mechanics beyond a simple crouch encourages the player to prioritize movement to avoid damage. And I intuitively found myself running on walls, cloaking, and running behind enemy lines, even when the sniper rifles and cover were provided for me.
Between locations, all of your goals are dictated to you by BT. He is more so the commanding officer than you. And you have the opportunity to respond. Either being rude and quippy, friendly, or overly familiar as the case may be. In the early game, BT responds with a cold, mission-oriented mindset. With a little bit of some classic robot-logic humor when Jake Cooper attempts to speak in idioms or out of emotion, it is upon defeating the first boss, Kane, that the tone of the dynamic is set.
Your responses do not matter. BT's pilot, Captain Tai Lastimosa, died for this mission, so the mission is all that matters. The pragmatist philosopher's attitude is displayed both by the merciless killing and sadism of the enemy, and by our cold, robotic dedication to mission objectives. Wars may be fought for some overall goal or principle, but the individual soldier isn't afforded time to think about their values. Survive, kill, discard, and repeat.
In the next sequence, we are separated from BT and must traverse a massive factory to reunite with him. All while being evaluated by the IMC Commander that runs the facility. Her name is Ash, and we have become a literal part of the product assembly line. When James Cooper asks what the IMC is building, BT is only able to answer that these are not mass-produced housing. Upon reaching the pinnacle of the factory, it is revealed to be a streamlined set up for simulating live combat scenarios.
Reminiscent of the famous Nuke Town map of Call of Duty, this training dome pits us and a group of captured Frontier soldiers against two Titans and a squadron of drones. All the while Ash speaks robotically, as if her predictions or expectations are actually mathematics and calculations.
This sequence is a clear critique of the military industrial complex. Exorbitant wealth spent on creating weaponry and simulations of war, on figuring out how to infiltrate and destroy a building. When the same funding, and often the same technology, could be spent on housing and other public works. Projects that would help the common man.
Ash, clearly has no care for the common man under her command. She plans to destroy the entire facility to dispose of this single failure. She lets the mask drop, as she reveals that she simply takes pleasure in playing with human lives. She enjoys pretending to be a cog in the machine, directing the violence of war by any means necessary.
After defeating Ash, we now enter Effect and Cause. The sequence Titanfall 2 is most lauded for. A fast-paced challenge of combat and traversal that replaces the player's cloaking tech with jumping between two different times. One in which the scientific research lab of the IMC is alive and thriving with security guards, the other after its collapse into an alien infested jungle. The bodies you killed in the past showing up in the present where you first saw them and took their weapons.
It's a beautiful and harrowing sequence. Giving you no time at all to consider how a solider might be already deceased such you can take their gun and become their killer in the past. From the enemy's perspective, a pilot slipping back and forth through consistently folded over timelines is no different than their ability to turn invisible.
And what is the cause of these localized time fluctuations? The IMC have discovered an alien technology capable of reducing entire planets to base resources. An energy resource they call The Ark. Their leader waxes on poetically about treating all human life as an expendable resource. A hypocritical soliloquy about how control is necessary for survival, and those who survive without that control are, in fact, dooming everyone. So instead they must kill everyone to justify maintaining their political control.
Truly a technocratic fascist governance on an intergalactic scale.
But above all, the IMC is impatient. The Core Systems, the government supporting the IMC, are apparently in full support of the destruction of the independent Frontier planets. But rather than wait and fight, they prefer to commodify dissidents into raw material. No thought given to how that may, say, disrupt the orbits of the various solar systems these habitable planets reside.
In the most sci-fi way possible, metaphorically presenting the expansionism of the military industrial complex and technocratic corporate interests as simultaneously harmful to human life and the ongoing survival of the ecosystems that support it. Centering the main reason for the Frontier Militia's conflict with the IMC as an environmentalist's fight to conserve and protect the world we live on.
Upon trying to return to BT, the Fold glove overloads. Miraculously placing us at the exact moment that the ARK went critical at the test facility. Pausing time, and allowing us to safely record its radiation signature to track later.
The next stage is The Beacon. Jeremy Cooper has to reactivate this militia satellite radio, to alert the rest of command as to the IMC's plan, and how to locate the ARK to stop it.
This was a pretty standard stage mixing combat and movement. Using the new side-arm, essentially a battery powered stun beam, as a button for moving platforms and solving simple puzzles. A tad lackluster compared to the gimmick of Effect and Cause, but nonetheless fun to pull off.
What did finally click with me in this section was how much more versatile BT's combat kit actually was. Mainly I found that by switching between the Ronin Loadout and the original Expedition, I could choose either a more defensive playstyle when overwhelmed by numbers, and a more offensive playstyle when pressing the advantage. You can even charge the extra powerful core techniques while using one loadout, only to switch to the loadout with the super move that's actually best for the situation.
While Titanfall 2 doesn't have customizing loadouts, what it gains by streamlining the mechs into distinct classes is a story mode with infinitely more versatility and variability with its mech gameplay.
Each loadout operating on the same timing based resources, so the player is still encouraged to engage with the challenge of the titan encounters, rather than constantly switching to randomly spam-fire all of your weapons.
The boss Titan pilot of this fight is Richter. A Viking cosplaying man reveling in combat and trying to capture BT for himself. Thanks to the new playstyle that clicked for me, our fight started with me using the Sword attacks to demolish his health bar to nearly zero in the first seconds, and sending him running and dodging behind rocks in the distance while I finished him off with Expedition loadout's rockets.
It was a pretty even trade though. My health had taken a beating, and I could have capitalized more if i had known how that sword worked before I used it!
Beacon ends with contacting Commander Sarah Briggs, who tries to reassign BT to a new pilot. But, beyond belief, BT refuses the reassignment and Briggs agrees to let us continue being his pilot.
More than any of the other missions, Beacon demonstrates that BT and Jaiden Cooper have truly become allies. There is a mutual trust and respect that can be replied upon to get these missions done. No longer merely cold and rational, BT talks to us as a friend. And it feels good to have earned his friendship.
The final stages of Titanfall 2 were a noted increase in difficulty. Significantly limited resources, fighting dozens of enemy titans and infantry over precarious falls. Viper was by far the hardest boss for me, and I'm pretty sure the checkpointing made the fight easier on me with repeat attempts.
I'm not going to spoil how the game ends here. It may seem like a silly thing to do for a 10 year old game. And most everyone watching this has probably already played it to completion, due to how youtube algorithms work. But on the off chance that you stumbled in here just to get my recommendation, this is it.
You need to play Titanfall 2.
There are almost no other mecha action games that have fully committed to making the mechs and the pilot co-equal parts of a seamless gameplay experience. And you deserve to experience it yourself. You're not just another cog in the machine of war.
So tell me, Kiddo. Now that you know the corporate scum are willing to destroy planets to maintain control. Now that you've seen what it means to truly partner with a Titan, are you ready to get in the robot?
Thank you for watching,
Take care of each other,
And Stay True.