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Titanfall 2: The Redbox $3.00 Review

We love games here at ldsgamers.com; we really do. I'm pretty sure that we all wish that game publishers would send us games to review just like they do, or they used to, with some of the more well-established game sites. If Sennheiser sent us a review copy of their Game One headphones, I would be pushing some of the other staff members out of the way to review them. But Sennheiser doesn't know we exist, as we are, "small in numbers". Of course, there's another issue. We're poor. Well, that's not true exactly, but we don't have enough subscribers and sponsors to provide us with the money to buy games to give them a proper review. Most of us have families and kids, and, when you have a family, you automatically become poor. To solve this problem, we've turned to Redbox. Here's how it works, one of us rents a game from Redbox for $3 and gives it essentially a $3 review. But, we're limited to the stuff that Redbox carries (sorry Wii U fans), and for our first $3 review, we have the newly released, Titanfall 2.

As a PS4 owner, I've never played the first Titanfall. This will be reviewed from someone entirely new to the series. Hey, I did say this was a $3 review, right? So, we save a few bucks by doing away with the comparisons to the first Titanfall game. I put in about four hours of gameplay, with two in the single player campaign and two in the multiplayer arenas. So here goes.

Single Player Story

You are Jack Cooper; aspiring pilot and character candidate for the most generic name ever. Without hopefully spoiling too much, the plot has all the staples of science-fiction movies. There's the experienced mentor from Star Wars/Star Trek/Lord of the Rings, there's also the obnoxious robot, obnoxiously stating the obvious, Australian accented mercenaries reminiscent of Mad Max, a really bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation just like any Arnold Schwarzeneggar movie, time travel with something suspiciously similar to Captain Jack's Vortex manipulator from Doctor Who, a very blatant rip-off from Pixar's, The Incedibles, (you'll know it when you see it), and of course, the all-encompassing plot MacGuffin that can destroy planets. That's not to say the story is bad. What I am saying is it has all of the ingredients you've come to expect, kind of like a fine steak dinner. Speaking of the story, the game does have an "M" rating, but I would give the dialogue a solid PG-13 rating. It's below Uncharted in terms of how often you encounter profanity, but I did not encounter any f-bombs.

Gameplay Controls

Gameplay is split into two modes: FPS and Titan mode. FPS gameplay is fairly Call of Duty Black Ops III-like in its movement, except it has a slightly faster and more fluid feel to it. Slides are faster and last a lot longer. Double-jumps are slightly shorter and wall running is way way better than Call of Duty. As a pilot you move very quickly and have a good fluid feel to your movement, as well as so many terrain options. Titans, on the other hand, are much more bulky and feel sluggish by comparison. I wish with that sluggishness came a better feeling of toughness. Enemy Titans felt like bullet sponges and my Titan a bullet magnet. I suppose that is the challenge of the game, but in the initial stages, you feel pretty weak and you still have to use strategy in order to survive in your Titan. Maybe I missed the button to make my Titan jump; that was something I felt was missing from the Titan gameplay. You can dash and sometimes crouch, but jumping is too much I guess. I'm not trying to be overly critical. I did enjoy the gameplay, but I do want to give an accurate representation of the controls.

Gameplay AI

The AI in the single player campaign is pretty standard. In other words, they make pretty decent targets. Fighting AI Titans was just dodge and shoot, repeat until one of you blows up. There was really not much out of the ordinary here to mention.

Multiplayer Experience

Titanfall 2 has quite a few multiplayer modes. However, due to the time it took to pair me up with games, I only was able to play two of them. The first mode I played was Bounty Hunt. It has an interesting take on team deathmatch where kills net you cash, which you have to bank in order to boost your team's overall score. The other was called mixtape, which was supposed to be a variety of game modes, but each time ended up Amped Hardpoint (i.e. Destiny's Control). Kills of other players and grunts are quick; kills of enemy titans take more time. When the Titans fall, the entire strategy of the game changes. Non-Titan characters scramble for cover, taking potshots at each other and Titans, while the Titans go at it. Occasionally a Titan would go "window shopping", as I named it, looking to pick off pilots hiding in buildings. At the end of each round, the losing teams pilots would try and scramble to a waiting jet to escape. However, I found that the winning team's Titans would camp around the escape point and very few, if any pilots, actually made it out. It's an interesting twist to MP gameplay, but in practice it didn't seem to work. Player movement is excellent and loadout selection seemed to be pretty good. Being brand new, other players who've invested more time in multi-player had leveled up to different and, probably better, loadouts and available weapons and Titans. So when you're starting out, be prepared to take some lumps. I don't know if the game will have any more lasting appeal than a Call of Duty or Battlefield game, which is refreshed yearly or sooner. I do know that as I played it I enjoyed it, but I didn't feel it was any better or worse than the games already in my library.

Dealbreakers

For me, there's only one dealbreaker in the game, and that is the lack of a gore filter. I had hoped that Respawn decided to thrown this setting in without telling anyone. They didn't. I mean, it's easy to turn off the voice dialogue if you don't want to hear it. However, the inability to disable what I call the pink mist and chunks that fly around when getting kills, especially with Titans or certain weapons, is something I don't want my kids to watch me play, nor would I want them to want to play games like that. I would highly recommend not begging your parents or spouse to let you buy this game. Save those brownie points for something else. You might not feel the same way and I can respect that. But, I can't justify owning it in my house.

That wraps up our first $3 Redbox review. I hope you found it worth at least $3 and hope it gives you an idea of what the game is like. I know I just scratched the surface of all the game had to offer, but at the end of the $3, I felt myself neither wanting more nor wanting to play it less. I guess that's a 'meh' for me. While it has some cool things to add to the FPS scene, I didn't feel any of them stood out enough to make a meaningful separation from the other games competing for your time and money. Hope you liked the review. Let us know what we should review from Redbox next.

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