Titanfall 2’s Campaign Still Outclasses Its Multiplayer a Decade Later

Titanfall 2 arrived on October 28, 2016, for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One, and it did something the first Titanfall never bothered to try: it gave players a reason to care about a mech. Respawn Entertainment built a campaign around Jack Cooper, a Frontier Militia rifleman, and BT-7274, the Titan he inherits when his mentor dies. The pairing is the whole trick, and it works.

Trailer, via IGDBcom.

Jack Cooper and BT-7274

The campaign opens with Cooper receiving off-the-books training from Captain Tai Lastimosa, a Pilot, to prepare him for candidacy. Their Militia force attacks the IMC-held planet Typhon. The Apex Predators, mercenaries led by Kuben Blisk and contracted by General Marder, mortally wound Lastimosa and cripple BT. With his dying breath, Lastimosa transfers control of the Titan to Cooper.

That handoff carries the story. Cooper is not a Pilot. He is a rifleman handed a mission he was never trained for, hunted by elite mercenaries across Typhon. BT explains the inheritance plainly: Cooper has also taken on Special Operation 217, a rendezvous with Major Eli Anderson that turns into a detour through a water reclamation facility and a manufacturing plant, with the Apex Predators Kane and Ash killed along the way.

A Laboratory Full of Corpses

The detour ends at an IMC laboratory, destroyed, its dead artificially aged by time-travel distortion. Cooper finds Anderson dead from a time-travel mishap. It is the strangest sequence in the game and the one that shows Respawn was willing to spend its campaign on ideas rather than corridor shooting.

The influences are not hidden. The team drew on buddy cop films, the video game Half-Life and the anime Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. What matters is that the borrowing holds together. A two-year development cycle began in mid-2014, and the decision to add a single-player campaign came from a wish to widen the player base. Different prototypes were folded into one coherent campaign. That is usually how committee thinking produces mush. Here it produced a partnership.

All pilots have a jump kit which assists with parkour, double-jumping, and wall-running.

Pilots, Titans and the Movement That Sells It

The shooting is fast and vertical. Every Pilot carries a jump kit for parkour, double-jumping and wall-running, and those movements chain together to cross ground quickly. Classes add specific tools: a grappling hook for mobility, or a holographic cloaking device. Respawn also added a ground slide, a pulse blade throwing knife that reveals nearby enemies, and a holo-pilot that mimics a player’s actions and appearance to confuse opponents.

Titans trade that mobility for protection and heavier guns. Six arrived at launch — Ion, Scorch, Northstar, Ronin, Tone and Legion — replacing the three classes of the first game. Monarch followed in the May 2017 Monarch’s Reign update. A heavily modified version of Valve’s Source engine powers all of it.

The Frontier, and Why It Holds Up

The war is fought in the Frontier, a region of star systems far from the Core Systems where Earth sits. The IMC wants the Frontier’s resources and does not much care what happens to its planets or its civilians. The Militia wants the IMC gone and the Frontier independent. After the Battle of Demeter the Militia is on the offensive. The IMC is weakened by lost reinforcements from the core systems, after James MacAllan destroyed a refueling facility, but it is still the dominant force.

That is thin politics, and Titanfall 2 never pretends otherwise. The setting is a frame for the Cooper and BT relationship, and the frame is sturdy enough to hold it.

What Respawn Fixed

The first Titanfall shipped without a campaign and leaned on multiplayer alone. Titanfall 2 keeps the multiplayer — team-based modes with Pilots and Titans fighting on the same battlefield — but overhauls the progression system and makes subtle changes to multiplayer to keep the gameplay fairer. The result is a sequel that fixes the complaint rather than restating it.

Here is the ranking of what actually carries this game:

1. The Cooper and BT campaign, which gives the shooting a spine.
2. The movement system — wall-running, double-jumping, sliding, grappling.
3. The six launch Titans and their distinct roles.
4. The multiplayer progression overhaul.
5. The setting, which is serviceable rather than memorable.

The Verdict on Titanfall 2

Titanfall 2 is the rare shooter where the campaign is the argument. The multiplayer is competent and the Titan roster gives it range, but the reason to play this in 2016 — and the reason it still gets talked about — is a rifleman and a mech completing a dead man’s mission on Typhon. The time-travel laboratory, the detour through the reclamation facility, the running fights with the Apex Predators: these are the parts that stick.

The weakness is the world around them. The Frontier’s politics are sketched, not written, and the IMC never becomes more than an obstacle. Respawn spent its invention on the relationship and let the war stay generic. That is a fair trade, and it is why the campaign lands while the setting fades.

What matters most is that Respawn proved a mech game could be about two characters rather than a chassis. Cooper is not a chosen soldier. He is a rifleman who inherited a job, and BT is a machine that treats the inheritance as a contract. That is a better premise than most shooters bother to build, and Titanfall 2 executes it without padding.

BT-7274 · first-person shooter · game review · mech games · Respawn Entertainment · Titanfall 2