Titanfall Preview

Major Nelson would say "Discussion over!" at this point, but it's not actually that simple.

Titanfall is a first-person shooter that adds wall running and double jumping to the combat, making for some really wacky parkour gunfighting opportunities. But in my play time, no one really used them. We all had our double jumps, sure, but we were never doing the insane stuff that the trailers and instructional videos had been practically begging us to attempt during my 40-minute wait on line.

Trying new things is all well and good, but trying new things when someone has a gun pointed at you and is licking his chops waiting for you to fail… can be scary, even when it's just a demo. I imagine seasoned players will be operating much differently. Today, though, all of us involved were fairly mired in the ways of, well, not running up the sides of buildings and backflipping off of shit.

I was thrown into a four-on-four deathmatch and went about my usual routine of trying to be the least bad player at the show. Each player begins as a pilot—armed but on foot. Eventually (I feel like this was based on a countdown) each will be given a chance, though not simultaneously, to enter and operate a mech suit called a Titan.

The early stages of a Titanfall deathmatch resemble most other FPS multiplayer bouts, but takes a turn when mechs start dropping—or, sorry, when Titans start falling. Some infantry soldiers have skills or weapons that can be effective in destroying the metallic giants, but these big bad Titans are overall a thing for the regular fighter to fear. When I was in my Titan, for example, I was making a habit of shooting my missiles right at the ground in front of my enemies and watching their corpses fly through the air.

That's not to say the pilots were utterly defenseless against the heaping Titans, though. When the roles were reversed and I found myself on foot taking on a huge robot, I could hold my own if I kept my tactics careful and placed some rockets well.

Eventually, we were given a message that our team had won! But the game was not over. After the decision is made, the losing team must retreat to a loading zone for evacuation, while the winning team can score bonuses by killing fleeing enemies.

More time with Titanfall, and therefore more time to get a firm grasp on all that fancy jumpery hoohah, could mean an increasingly fun, unique shooter experience indeed. I like multiplayer shooting, but for me, it's usually in single-player modes. I own a bunch of FPS games that I don't play online. Titanfall's TGS demo, however, has me keeping a passive eye on this multiplayer-only shooter.

Everything of course handled well and looked amazing: It's the kind of PC game that Microsoft wishes it could say was also appearing on Xbox hardware.

I know that it's announced for Xbox One (yeah, yeah), but I'm going to tease anyway, because we were all playing this game with Xbox 360 controllers plugged into PC towers… that had giant Xbox One logos behind them.