So, I played a good bit of the Titanfall beta over the last few days, and I was severely underwhelmed by it to be honest. There's some positives, but for all the hype and for how good it looked like it could be, it was a let down to actually play it.*
Let's start with the positives though, because like I said they definitely exist. The first and largest positive is that it is a 100% new IP. In today's industry of reboots and sequels, a genuine new title is a real breath of fresh air.
Another positive is the pilot movement. The freerunning-style movement that was such a failure in Brink is really polished and refined in Titanfall, and it makes moving around as a pilot smooth, quick, and genuinely fun. It opens up maps, reduces choke points, and is generally a really good aspect of the game. I was really worried that it would be clunky and unintuitive, but it's none of those. To put it simply, it just works.
One other positive is the Titans themselves. They work well in giving the player choices that have tradeoffs, allowing you to build your Titan to be better against infantry, or other Titans, or more tricky, and forcing you to niche yourself slightly with what equipment you put on your Titan. I also think that the Titan vs Titan combat is decent; it could be a lot better, but it could also be a lot worse. Not really a positive, but not really a negative either.
Now, on to the negatives, and honestly, there's more of them than there should be. First, and most noticeable, is the user interface. Maybe this is a personal taste thing, but I hated the look of it. Beyond the look of the menus, there's the problem of functionality. They are not intuitively laid out, they're extraordinarily difficult to access if you're in a party with someone else who is playing the game, and they're generally a bit laggy and buggy**.
Now, for actual gameplay, there's a fair few as well. Among the most noticeable is the complete lack of nicheing in the pilot game. You get, as a pilot, to carry the exact same equipment no matter what. You always get a primary weapon, a secondary weapon, grenades, cloaking, a jetpack, and an anti-Titan weapon. There is zero tradeoff for making yourself better against infantry or against Titans- every pilot is equally capable against both. The only nicheing is in how you want to go about killing other infantry, and even that is really marginal because of the lack of ammo (more on this later); basically, as a pilot, everyone can do everything, which is not a great situation to have when you're trying to promote a natural cyclic balance, which at least the Titans do.
I said I'd talk more about the ammo, and now I will. Not having a limit on ammunition wouldn't be as much of a problem if the game was paced differently, but with as super-twitch as the pilot kills are right now, it's really bad. It makes the assault rifle vastly better than it should be if you want all the weapons to be balanced, and here's why: you can take as many shots to kill someone as you need to. It allows you to attempt to engage at great distances, because there's no downside to trying. So you have to reload and didn't get a kill, big deal. There's just as good of a chance that you'll light off a clip at someone 300 yards away and hit them with like 3 bullets, which is enough to kill them. So yeah, you spent 32 rounds to get one kill, but who cares? You have an infinite amount of them. I don't know who made that decision, but it's really bad right now. Either lengthen kill times, impose an ammo limit, or reduce damage based on range...something. The balance the way it is right now is way off.
Also, the bullet shield that Titans get is so lawl. It's a stupid gimmick that kills the pacing of Titan vs Titan fights. The post-game “extraction” is another stupid gimmick that really adds nothing to the game. I guess it's something that makes Titanfall a little different than other shooters, but it just seems kinda...dumb. I know that's subjective, but there it is. If someone can tell me what it legitimately adds to the game, I might change my opinion. Until then, it seems really gimmicky to me.
Another issue is the bugginess of the 'rodeo' mechanic. Sometimes you'll go up and get randomly smashed by the Titan even if it wasn't moving, and sometimes it will actually step on you, push you under the map, and not kill you, leaving you to pop up from under the Titan's foot like a damn whack-a-mole. The whole thing is really bad right now, and honestly I think you could completely eliminate the mechanic without losing anything- pilots have enough ways to kill Titans without it.
The last real problem I have is with the player count. 6 on 6 isn't enough, or if it is, the AI goons need to be a lot more dangerous. Right now, they basically add nothing to the game other than to disguise how infrequently you're actually fighting other players. You can take on 8 or 10 of them at once, alone, with zero risk of death, so why have them at all? It's a cheap trick to cover up the fact that they couldn't make their netcode good enough to support more players, and it doesn't really work.
As a subjective issue, I think that there are too many ways to kill the Titans, which leaves them a little bit underpowered. With all 6 pilots on the other team being able to rodeo you or use their anti-Titan weapons against you (some from quite a long ways away) plus the other Titans, there's kind of too many ways to takes hits for how weak they are. If their shields were stronger it would help, but really I think rebalancing the other parts of the game would be a better way to go, because changing the Titans themselves would affect the Titan vs Titan fights, which I think are pretty decent as-is. Make it a trade-off for pilots to be effective against Titans and clean up or remove the rodeo mechanic and I think things would be a lot better.
So yeah, there's my honest thoughts on Titanfall after playing the beta. It's basically a mediocre shooter and a mediocre mech game glued together with a little bit of a token effort at integration. The marriage of two mediocre aspects doesn't really make either one better. The pilot game on its own wouldn't be much of a game, because there are much better shooters out there that are similar. Sure, it has a flashy movement system and some cool stuff, but the bones of it are pretty damn simple shooter. The Titan game is in pretty much the same boat; there are much better mech games out there. Sure, Titanfall looks good and the mech interface is cool, especially the ability to get out and give it orders, but that's not really enough to make a whole game on its own. Together, the two just about manage to make a whole game, but it just isn't a particularly great one, because it's built on two mediocre foundations.
*- This is still the beta. Things might change before final release. However, with how close together the dates for the beta and the release are, I wouldn't expect too much to change.
**- The menus are one aspect I would be surprised if were not changed between the beta and release. They're so bad right now that I don't think they'd be able to get away with releasing them in the full game.
Feels more like a reduced price game then a full priced affair in most areas except graphics/production.
+1 to this. If no one told me before playing it, I'd probably think it was a particularly nice looking F2P shooter. Not sure exactly what about it gives it that feeling, but it's definitely there...
(Instead of $400 
)
