Late October was the last time I opened and played Titanfall. It was about 2 weeks after I came back from a vacation in Japan, land of neon, pachinko, ramen and robots. At that point I really felt like I was missing this game, even though it wasn’t updated in any way. However, I was playing Rocket League for too long and needed a break.

Opened the game: Around 500 players playing Attrition – Titanfall’s most popular mode and about 200 playing Frontier Defense – the late-added co-op horde mode.

I felt bad. This is a game I easily sank over 100 hours into (might not sound a lot, but I work 45-50 hours a week, not including commute), not including the time playing the beta and have enjoyed playing alone or with friends, suddenly has so few players. Admittedly, it has been like this for a while on PC… The game has been out for over a year and a half – all of its DLC were already released (for free, after a year) and no more updates are coming in… But this is a multiplayer game with some nice ideas that somehow didn’t take off.

Titanfall was a winner of some awards at E3 2013 and was hyped to fuck and back by the video game media. Some people thought it would be the next Call of Duty, as it comes from that series’ creators, under a new banner. The game came out to good reviews, had no launch issues, no major performance problems, no over-the-top DLC or any microtransactions. All of this – published by your good friends at EA.

…and despite all of that, the game didn’t splash.

To be honest, the thought of this game being online-only at $60 wasn’t very appealing. I played the beta and thought it was good, but not $60 good (in my defense, there are very few games I pay $60 for – this year, only The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt had that privilege.) I waited until the price dropped to $30 and got it. After that, I pretty much played it every day.

If I dissect the game, it’s pretty easy to understand why I liked it. There are a number of elements in the game that were not original by any stretch, but collectively, they made something unique.

The pilot gunplay itself felt like Call of Duty. Perhaps with a bit more recoil, long time-to-kill (which is good for me) but just as fast. This allowed for the game to have futuristic weapons that felt modern, in a way. Next, was the “parkour” – it’s under quotation marks because it’s not really parkour. I am referring to the double-jumping and wall-running. This would remind people of Mirror’s Edge or Brink – but not so much. The above plus the bunny-hopping, would be a player’s key to traversing the battlefield in a fast manner. This is where the skilled players are good at. If you master the movement in the game, you will most likely succeed. For me, this felt a little like an arena shooter, like Unreal Tournament, a game which I hold dearly and played every iteration of.

Now the Titans…

I have been a long time fan of mechas, hence my mentioning (and somewhat part of the purpose) of my trip to Japan. There’s something that I found very appealing for most of my lifetime and that’s when armored suits and giant robots clash and do battle. This has been slowly but surely made its transition from anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion to the west, in films like Pacific Rim. For me, I used to play a lot of MechWarrior 2 and 3 as a kid and then later watched way too much anime with it. So here comes a future-military-scifi shooter where you are inside a mech, mowing down pilots and grunts with your 40mm cannon and stomping them! Yes please!

Despite all of this, the game didn’t do very well. The main reason I could find online was “not enough content”. You could not customize your character, other than selecting a gender, the game released with 6 modes, half of which were not interesting and the interesting modes were added too late down the life of the game (Marked for Death, Frontier Defense, “Floor is Lava” mode). Too few guns, too little unlockables. So the problem was people did not have a big enough carrot in front of their faces. As far as I was concerned the gameplay more than makes up for these weaknesses, but others felt otherwise.

Strangely enough, while the game wasn’t the “next Call of Duty” – the next games in CoD would feature double-jump and wallrunning for the first time. Surprise!

What’s next for the game? For me, probably not much. There are too many new games coming out that I haven’t played yet and I am currently about 7000 kilometers away from my PC. As for the franchise, developer Respawn Entertainment already announced Titanfall 2 is in the making, so I got something to look forward to.

If you’ve never tried Titanfall – please give it a shot. It has free demo time on PC. Maybe it will be the culmination of a lot of things you liked, like it was for me.