Titanfall 2: EA's Overlooked Success

     

Now, I'm sure you've heard all about how awful of a company EA is, and honestly I agree. They have terrible customer service and have slaughtered beloved series left and right. There is far more to what makes them, well, not great but that isn't the point of this article. Today I want to talk about a great game, marred by release issues and the publisher name on its box. Titanfall 2 is really a fantastic game that has been widely overlooked by websites and reviewers. I'm here to talk about why I love it.

     Titanfall 2 was a notorious financial failure for EA upon release. This was largely due to it's bad release date. However it actually is a great example of how good of a game EA can make. As a multiplayer focused first person shooter, Titanfall 2 is an obvious game to feature heavy and deceptive monetization schemes. You also might not expect it to bother with a campaign, a la Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. So first off; the monetization actually is not extremely obvious and in your face. I'm not sure if this has always been the case, but as my play through of the game there is not an obvious push for me to pay real world money. While I absolutely can pay for certain things, I don't see it being shoved in my face. The game doesn't even feature loot boxes, as far as I can tell. That is huge for EA. The multiplayer in general is very fun, time to get into a match is relatively short, and the fights always seem balance. But where the game truly shines is the unique combat mechanics. Most modern shooters have enhanced movement such as wall running, special abilities and killstreak rewards, and much more. Titanfall has the unique mechanic of, well, Titanfalls. As you earn points by killing enemies and performing other feats in multiplayer, a gauge will build. When filled you can press down on your D-Pad to call down your personal Titan. Titans are giant robots with powerful weapons which can be controlled manually or fight alongside you as an gigantic AI partner. Of course everyone can call in these Titans, and so the battlefield can feel absolutely epic as you fight soldiers while avoiding the massive footsteps of iron giants surrounding you. To supplement this, the warzone is littered with AI footsoldiers and smaller robots, filling up the map and making it truly chaotic. It is unbelievably fun and seems generally quite balanced. EA really has the multiplayer down, and with a lack of loot boxes it just feels so right. 

     The next and final major thing in the game I want to go over is the Single Player Campaign. Goodness this campaign shines bright. Without giving too many spoilers, you play as a young soldier who dreams of being a Pilot (a special forces unit who can command a personal Titan). You are unexpectedly thrown into the position of a Pilot when your whole team is killed and only the you, a Titan called BT and BT's dying Pilot remain on the battlefield. You gain control of the powerful machine and quickly grow to love him. The story is very basic for an FPS (bad guys have superweapon, stop them) but they really make you love the main characters and also fit in some very fun gameplay and puzzles. Each level is different from one another, it's not just run here and shoot this. Often you are separated from BT and have to find your way back to him. One level you use a device the transports you between two different time periods. In another you get a gun that just activates special switches you have to trigger throughout the level. Mix that with the fast paced and 360 degree movement and it balances nicely into a well rounded campaign. BT may also be the best robot since Baymax of Big Hero 6. He is a robot with a big personality, one that grows as you play. while dialogue options are not super prevalent, what ones are there help grow him into a fully fledged person. I just love it and if the do Titanfall 3 the big guy BETTER BE IN THERE!!!!

     Long story short, Titanfall 2 may have released rife with controversy, but it now is an extremely enjoyable and unique game, and may be one of the best First Person Shooters out there as far as pure fun goes. If you don't like EA, I get that and I don't particularly love them either. Don't let that mar your view of a game as good as this. Titanfall is great, I enjoy it and will continue to play it probably until I get Kingdom Hearts 3. 

Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders. A Diamond in the Rough.

I grew up playing Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders as a kid, and I was absolutely terrible at it. The progression of me trying to play The Crusaders was thus: Up until I was 17 I couldn't even complete the first campaign--the easy campaign--and I could only get through the first couple missions of the normal campaign. If you haven't played the game, there are four campaigns: easy, normal, and two hard. In that same order they are Gerald, Lucretia, Kendal, and Regnier (most people seem to agree that Kendal’s campaign is slightly easier than Regnier’s). From the start, both Gerald and Lucretia are available to play, but Kendal and Regnier are locked until you beat Lucretia’s campaign. So up until recently I had never played either of the hard difficulties. Back to it. Sometime when I was 18 I think I played the game again and was able to beat Gerald’s campaign but I couldn’t win the final mission of Lucretia’s. Still the other two characters eluded me. Finally, I played the game again (I am now almost 22) and I finally beat the entire game! When I completed that final mission as Lucretia I walked into my room and said to my roommate “I. Am. A god!”

So now onto what I think of the game. Obviously I liked it enough to keep picking it back up. In fact, before I played it this last time, I slowly stopped playing other games because I wanted to play Crusaders so bad. The game mechanics, in my mind, are phenomenal. It’s so cool that you are actually controlling an army. Now, you control armies in lots of different RTS games, but to me, Crusaders has a different feel. It just feels right that the units are in actual troops. You have a troop of infantry, cavalry, and archers that you both control and order, as opposed to several individual units. Counters for enemy units are straightforward and simple, not so many that you have to freak out. If there’s something doing splash damage like mortars, catapults, ballista, spread your troops out to avoid getting blasted. Archers shooting at you? Close up and block the arrows (although I found it easier to also spread out and try to rush there instead). When you’re in combat with your infantry troop you will control your main character, (whoever’s campaign it is) and the combat is a hack and slash style with melee combos that felt good. I didn’t just button mash, but used certain tactics against different enemies. Gameplay just felt right and made sense.

There were a couple things that stood out to me between the first two campaigns and the hard campaigns. First was that the scale of the battles goes up dramatically. Kendal’s campaign starts instantly with a massive battle bigger than anything you’ve seen previously and each mission tends to stay that way. The huge fights stay fast paced and I found that I was maneuvering troops significantly more than I had before. The second was that in the hard campaigns you pick all of the troops you bring into each mission. In the first two campaigns the game would hold your hand and lock in certain troops that you needed for most missions (even if you didn’t want them because you had something better). In the hard campaigns you could really tailor the experience and try different things if you wanted. Inevitably, I tended to stay with a combination of archers and heavy cavalry (and if I had more space I often brought more archers because I could have them be dedicated healers). This made the game feel very fresh, new, and I felt that it was the way the game was meant to be played.

The character dynamics were great, how I would imagine things should be. Your main character has two aids who tend to be opposites in their personalities, and the dialogue and voice acting is very well done. The subtitles don’t always line up with what is actually said, but you can clearly hear the voice acting (which many games cannot claim). Something that I personally found funny, especially after I understood it more, was the cutting of the word “patriarch” every time it was said in the game. From what I understand, the game first had all dialogue recorded using the term “pope” instead of “patriarch,” but because they were worried about using “pope” they decided to change it. However, with the audio already recorded, they simply changed the subtitles and bleeped out "pope" every time someone said it. Until then I had decided in my mind that somehow the word “patriarch” was so holy no one could actually say it, including the patriarch himself. It gives me a good chuckle every time I hear the brief silence where “pope” was cut out of the audio.

The last thing I’ll mention is the music. Though some people seem to hate it, I love it. One article I saw criticized the music because it didn't fit with that “period.” Firstly, in a fantasy universe there is no “period.” Maybe heavy metal was the period at the time. Simply put, the fighting is fast paced, intense, over the top, and epic, and the music was also fast paced, intense, over the top, and made me feel epic. I think it fits perfectly.

All in all I would recommend The Crusaders to anyone who thinks they can handle it. It’s challenging and therefore fulfilling. It’s an absolute blast and I had a very hard time putting it down. Each time I sat down I would plow through and entire campaign if I could. My biggest regret is that Heroes, the next Kingdom Under Fire game isn’t compatible with the Xbox 360. Otherwise, if you’ve got $10 to spare, I’d recommend this game.