Titanfall 2

Let’s get the tragedy out of the way first. In October 2016, publisher EA dropped Titanfall 2 into a two-week window sandwiched between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. It was the retail equivalent of releasing a great indie film opposite two Marvel blockbusters. The game sold a fraction of what it deserved, and a genuine masterpiece became a cautionary tale about marketing.

That’s the business story. The game itself is something else entirely.

Developed by Respawn Entertainment—the studio founded by the ex-Infinity Ward veterans who built modern Call of Duty—Titanfall 2 is a first-person shooter with two beating hearts. On foot, you’re a Pilot, a hyper-mobile soldier who wall-runs, double-jumps, slides, and grapples across the battlefield with the fluidity of a parkour athlete. When the moment is right, you call down a Titan: a three-story mech that turns you from a nimble skirmisher into a walking artillery platform. The tension between these two states—fast and fragile versus slow and lethal—is the whole game, and it’s brilliant.

The package splits cleanly in two. There’s a compact single-player campaign, added almost as an apology after the multiplayer-only first game. And there’s the multiplayer, which Respawn always considered the main event. Both are excellent. What’s remarkable is how the campaign, a near-afterthought in the studio’s own framing, became the thing people won’t stop talking about a decade later.

Positioned against the military-shooter orthodoxy of its era—the cover-shooting, the two-weapon loadouts, the grounded “realism”—Titanfall 2 looks almost reckless. It wants you moving at all times. Standing still gets you killed. That single design conviction separates it from nearly everything else on the shelf, then and now.

• The Movement System: Wall-running, double-jumping, sliding, and grappling combine into a traversal language you speak rather than execute. Momentum is a resource. Skilled Pilots flow across a map without ever touching the ground for long.
• Titan Combat: Six distinct Titan classes—Ion, Scorch, Ronin, Tone, Northstar, and Legion—each play like a different character. Ronin is a shotgun-wielding duelist; Northstar a sniper that hovers; Scorch a close-range pyromaniac. This is class design done right.
• The Campaign: A tightly authored single-player story built around Pilot Jack Cooper and his Vanguard-class Titan, BT-7274. It’s a buddy movie disguised as a shooter, and its mid-game level “Effect and Cause” is one of the best-designed missions in the medium.
• Deep Customization: Extensive weapon attachments, Titan loadouts, Pilot tacticals (cloak, grapple, phase-shift), and cosmetics give the multiplayer real long-term texture.
• Objective Modes: Beyond team-deathmatch-adjacent Attrition, the game offers Bounty Hunt and the excellent objective mode Amped Hardpoint, which rewards mobility and map control over raw kills.

The Gameplay Loop

Here’s the genius of it: Titanfall 2 is two games playing chess with each other in real time.

As a Pilot, you are fast and lethal but made of paper. A single Titan volley erases you. So you learn to read the battlefield vertically—running walls to flank, sliding under fire, grappling to a rooftop to reposition. The time-to-kill between Pilots is brutally short, which sounds punishing but actually rewards aggression and map knowledge. Death is cheap; respawns are quick. You’re encouraged to take risks because standing back and playing it safe is both boring and ineffective.

Then you earn your Titan. The meter fills through kills, objectives, and simply surviving, and when it’s ready you call your mech down from orbit—it literally crashes into the map. Now the calculus inverts. You’re powerful, durable, and slow. You dominate open ground but you’ve become a target for enemy Pilots, who can leap onto your back and “rodeo” you, ripping out your battery. The predator becomes the prey. That constant role-switching—nimble assassin, then lumbering giant, then back on foot when your Titan falls—is a rhythm no other shooter replicates.

The six Titans deserve special praise. Where “hero shooters” often mean shallow gimmicks, these feel like fully realized fighting-game characters. Ronin phases in with a sword and a mass-driver shotgun, demanding aggressive close-range play. Northstar trades armor for flight and a charged rail cannon, rewarding patience and positioning. Learning one is a genuine skill investment. Mastering the matchup between them is where the depth lives.

The Campaign Nobody Expected

“Effect and Cause” deserves its reputation.

Roughly halfway through the campaign, Titanfall 2 hands you a device that lets you shift between two time periods—a pristine facility in the past and its bombed-out ruin in the present—instantly, mid-jump, with a button press. You’ll leap through a broken floor in the present, tap the button, and land on solid ground in the past. Enemies exist in one timeline but not the other. Puzzles and firefights bleed across both.

Most studios would build an entire game around a mechanic this good. Respawn used it for one level, nailed it perfectly, and then moved on—confident enough in their ideas to spend them freely. The whole campaign works like that. Nearly every mission introduces a fresh mechanic, exploits it, and retires it before it wears out. A gauntlet time-trial. A gravity-lift factory that reconfigures itself around you. That pacing discipline puts far more expensive campaigns to shame.

And underneath the mechanical fireworks is a genuinely affecting relationship. BT-7274, your Titan, is a straight-man robot whose deadpan literalism and quiet loyalty land harder than they have any right to. The bond between Cooper and BT is the emotional spine of the whole thing, and the campaign’s climax earns its payoff honestly. You will care about a mech—which is not something a shooter gets to promise.

Onboarding and Friction

The one real cost of all this depth is the learning curve. The movement system has a low floor but a stratospheric ceiling, and new players dropping into multiplayer years after launch will face veterans who chain wall-runs like they’re breathing. The campaign is, by design, the perfect tutorial—play it first, always—but the multiplayer offers little hand-holding for the momentum mechanics that separate the good from the great.

The Source engine underpinnings show their age in still screenshots, but in motion none of that matters. Titanfall 2 was engineered around consistent frame pacing because the entire fantasy collapses without it—you cannot wall-run at speed through stutter. A 2D-scope shooter built on a decade-old engine is light on hardware, and the PC version scales comfortably from modest rigs to high-refresh setups. The art direction leans into a clean, readable industrial sci-fi palette; you can always tell a Pilot from a grunt from a Titan at a glance, which in a game this fast is a design necessity, not a luxury.

The audio work is the unsung hero. Titans land with a concussive weight. Weapons have distinct, punchy signatures. BT’s voice—measured, synthetic, oddly warm—carries the campaign.

On Steam—where the game arrived in June 2020 after launching on EA’s own storefront—Titanfall 2 is in the best shape of its life. The mouse-and-keyboard control scheme is where this game was born to live: the precision movement demands the granular control only a mouse provides, and advanced techniques are far more accessible than on a controller. The Steam release reinvigorated the player base, and the community remains active years on. For a title this old, its multiplayer health is a minor miracle—and proof of how badly players wanted it to survive.

Titanfall 2 is what happens when a studio of genre veterans is given room to be inventive and the confidence to spend their best ideas without hoarding them. The movement is peerless. The Titan combat has real depth. And the campaign—the part they almost didn’t make—is a small miracle of design economy, and the single best argument for what this medium can do.

It should have been a phenomenon. Instead it became a cult classic, kept alive by word of mouth and a community that refused to let it die. That’s a shame for the sales sheet and a gift for everyone who finally gives it a chance. Nearly a decade on, it hasn’t been surpassed. We rate it Outstanding, and we recommend it without hesitation.