PC Gamer: We might be in for the most creative shooter campaign this yr (Titanfall 2) #1
You shoot bad guys, sure, but you also have branching conversations with a robot companion and Super-Meat-Boy your way through challenging platforming gauntlets, all set in a cohesive, mysterious science fiction world. It’s one of the most surprising action shooters I’ve played in recent memory, a planetary tour that gets more mileage out of experimenting with level design and traversal than no-scoping enemy infantry.
Firefights are playgrounds for player expression, tense set pieces that make use of every tool available to the pilot.
If stealth is your strong suit, you can treat combat arenas like Far Cry outposts, sneaking around, bouncing from cover to cover with the cloak and knocking out the enemies one by one—until things inevitably go wrong.
One level takes place in an underground manufacturing plant, and to escape you need to follow the massive assembly line, hopping between moving platforms as they rotate and spill out into the abyss below. It’s as easy to get crushed by a robotic arm or compression plate as it is to get shot by the IMC forces filling out the platforms and workspaces adjacent to the assembly line. I could hop down from the assembly line and thin out the IMC forces at any point, or I could stealth and platform my way through without harming a fly. It’s a radical design choice for a shooter that comes from some of the same minds behind Call of Duty 4.
To go from an intricate underground Aperture Science-esque platforming gauntlet to piloting a massive robot on a screaming battlefield within the same two hours illustrates the surprising breadth of Titanfall 2’s campaign. I expected Titanfall 2 to be a whack-a-mole shooter tour through a few linear levels—a silly blockbuster robot fantasy. If what I played is any indication, we might be in for the most creative shooter campaign this year. The inverse of Doom, an FPS that went for intense, focused gunplay, Titanfall 2 is aiming for variety, to be an amusement park of playful shooter and platforming experiments.
http://www.pcgamer.com/titanfall-2s-singleplayer-campaign-is-more-portal-2-than-call-of-duty/
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/titanfall-2s-campaign-contains-traces-of-halo-fire/1100-6444023/?ftag=GSS-05-10aaa0b
http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/09/29/titanfall-2-campaign-hands-on-preview-the-first-3-hours-are-intense
