For too long, obviously multiplayer-focused shooters have shipped with short, humdrum singleplayer campaigns, but while Titanfalls shift away from that is commendable, the package as a whole is slight. In a multiplayer-only game, just five modes feels stingy. Attrition and Hardpoint are joined by Capture The Flag, mecha-centric brawl Last Titan Standing, and Pilot Hunter, in which only enemy foot-soldier kills count towards your teams score. Yet while every mode puts you in a team, theres very little teamwork on show during public matches on either Xbox One or PC, at least partially because of how individually powerful the rich toolset makes you feel. A well-organised group will almost always win, but omitting clan support and other community-minded features makes getting a team together harder than it should be, even given the arrival of Xbox Ones belated party chat system.
Yet when youre in the thick of it, none of that matters. Where Halo sought to give players the same 30 seconds of fun again and again, Titanfall dishes out its thrills in five-second bursts that each feel markedly different to the last, all the while smoothing out some of the kinks that have dogged this genre for years. Its a thoroughly successful evolution of the twitch shooter, broadening its scope both upwards and outwards as well as expanding its toolset. The genres focus on fast, responsive movement reaches bold new heights, too, letting you chain wall runs and double jumps into the sky before thundering back down in the cockpit of a giant robot. Titanfall might not be Xbox Ones killer app, or Azures proof of concept, then, but its a long-overdue adrenaline shot for a genre that seemed in danger of flatlining.
