I’ve heard a lot of positive things about Titanfall 2 singleplayer campaign back when it was released over 2 years ago, but somehow couldn’t really be bothered to play it until now. Recent release of a (yet another) battle royale title, Apex Legends set in the same universe, reminded me that I need to check how good that campaign actually was. So I did. And… it’s fine.
Titanfall was a purely multiplayer-focused game with no traditional campaign mode, despite having some curious (if simplistic) world lore. Instead the story of the game was told in snippets and set pieces during the multiplayer matches when playing in campaign mode, though, as I understand, a later update to the game removed even this piece of storytelling. Titanfall 2 goes for a more traditional approach with levels and features created specifically for the singleplayer story campaign.
People like Titanfall for 2 things: freerunning aspects of on-foot navigation and ability to enter a “Titan” – a giant mech with a specific loadout. Campaign, obviously, tried to keep both of those in more or less equal amounts. And it turned out fun. Having really quick-paced combat, double jumping, running along the walls and some fun guns to use when playing as a pilot is entertaining and feels fresh, mostly due to the overall stale nature of first person shooters lately. And different levels go for different “gimmicks”, all trying to use the freerunning in an interesting way and, apart from very few exceptions, never forcing you to kill enemies – so you can just be quick and agile and shoot only those who get in the way. Playing in the titan, while considerably slower, turned out more fun than I expected, due to interesting loadout mechanic, exclusive to singelplayer, allowing you to switch between “classes” of the mech on the fly. And although it’s less exhilarating than the pilot gameplay, interesting arenas and encounter design, especially during the boss fights, make these segments pretty entertaining.
But apart from the variety found during the levels and apart from the main gameplay features, the singleplayer campaign isn’t particularly noteworthy. The story is your typical hero in the making garbage, where most of the dialogue directed at your player character is there to say how awesome you are and how you will save everyone because no one else can. The dynamic between the main character and the titan can be adorable at times, but isn’t really going above the minimum levels of character development. The staging and direction of the story is extremely simplistic, reminding that “hey, this is a tacked on story mode for a multiplayer project”. And this happens in ways far more evident and cheap feeling than in lots of Call of Duty games. Though, far more importantly, it often reminded me of Tribes: Vengeance – the only singleplayer-focused title among the multiplayer-only franchise, that managed to tell a genuinely great story across several generations on a clearly lower budget than what EA could provide for Titanfall.
And that’s what we have here. A singleplayer campaign that’s not terrible, compared to lots of garbage that happened in singleplayer focused FPS market over the past decade. Yet also a campaign that feels distinctly tacked on and feels weaker than a lot of early 00s budget-y FPS games. Should you get Titanfall 2 if you don’t care about multiplayer enough or at all? No. I’d even suggest checking some of the better COD campaigns instead. But yeah, I did have some fun with it while it lasted.