The Pilot and the Machine

The first Titanfall built something genuinely new—a first-person shooter where the movement system was the game itself. Wall-running, launching off surfaces, threading through architecture at speed: these weren’t tricks or unlocks, they were the grammar of how you played. The problem was that it launched with no single-player campaign, which meant half the potential audience never found a way in.

Titanfall 2 fixed that. The campaign follows Jack Cooper, a militia rifleman who inherits a Titan called BT-7274 under circumstances that leave them both stranded behind enemy lines. What follows is about six hours of the best first-person platforming in any shooter I’ve played—levels that drop you between time periods, industrial machinery repurposed as terrain, spaces that reveal themselves as something entirely other than what they first appeared. Most games would save half these ideas for a sequel. But the center of it is the relationship between Cooper and BT, a bond the game earns slowly and cashes in hard.

Vince Zampella, Respawn’s CEO and one of the original architects of Call of Duty, described Titanfall 2 as building on the first game’s innovations with a bespoke single-player campaign and an even more comprehensive multiplayer mode. The multiplayer delivers—Titans and Pilots, fast and brutal, with the same kinetic energy as the original. But "bespoke" undersells the campaign, which doesn’t feel tailored so much as obsessively constructed.

It came out in October 2016, sandwiched between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare—one of the worse release timing decisions in recent gaming history. It deserved a bigger window, a bigger audience, and a sequel that never came. Some games get buried by circumstance. This was one of them.