Does Titanfall 2’s Single Player Campaign Hold Up 10 Years Later?

“You know what’s actually a really great, underrated gaming experience? The Titanfall 2 single player campaign.” I’ve been saying these words for a decade now as a gaming icebreaker, a conversation starter. That the multiplayer game has an underappreciated and underplayed single player story superior to those from other first person shooters. I’ve been championing Titanfall 2 for ten years now but I haven’t played it for, well, ten years now. I thought it was about time to revisit the game, to see if I still agree with my original assessment or whether I’ve been spouting rubbish for a decade. Does the game live up to my memory of it?

Initially, it would seem not. The first thing that struck me this time was how generic everything was. The playable character is “Jack Cooper,” and just from the name you understand he’s the most generic hero imaginable, with lame dialogue and a flat performance. Thankfully, his Titan mech suit/robot is the true star. We find them in the middle of a very generic interstellar conflict of two opposing forces, ‘the militia’ who might as well be the Rebel Alliance, and the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, who might as well be the Empire.

It has everything you’d expect from such a story: obliquely talked about superweapons left over by a long dead alien civilisation, corporate baddies and ragtag goodies, a planet in peril, a traditional hero’s journey, and a new bad guy for each level, who have nothing but a cool design, bad one liners, and questionable accents. All you need for characters in a battle royale, with the origins of Apex Legends clearly on display. It’s fun to see the origins of some other Respawn games within Titanfall 2. Beyond the Star Wars-y base conflict, there are obvious connections to the Jedi games to come, like the wall running and our droid companion BT being just a letter different to BD. Although there’s an awful lot of Avatar, too. But at least it’s not a space shooter ripping of Aliens. It’s ripping off a rip off of Aliens.

But I’m going to stop the negativity here. At first I was struck by how conventional and indistinct everything felt in relation to the story. But then you get moving and suddenly I remembered why I liked this game so much. The movement is fantastic, so fast and fluid, and the level design lets you keep the speed up. I found myself sprinting and sliding and wall running everywhere and I always ended up going in the right direction without much conscious thought. At its heart, what makes the single player successful is that it transplants everything great about the multiplayer gameplay into a campaign mode.

It has that great balance of there always being two battles at once: the larger mech and smaller human, and both feel great so it’s never a disappointment when you swap between them. Playing again now made me mad the franchise ended here when Respawn had it nailed. And the campaign works because it offers a level of catharsis that the older Call of Duty campaigns offered when I used to play those. When I had a bad multiplayer round (around 85% of the time) and struggled to kill pretty much anyone, I’d switch over to the single player and blast my way through dozens of NPCs to convince myself I’d still got it. Titanfall 2’s campaign opens up everything the multiplayer has to keep locked down for balance reasons. You can swap Titan classes instantly, fully utilise every weapon all the time against legions of foes, go on the rampage, and generally have as much fun as possible.

While the first few levels are basic FPS designs (although it was nostalgic to play a tutorial level for the first time in years, “remember, switching weapon is faster than reloading”), the game begins to introduce some very cool and unique environments. The factory assembling pre-fab buildings is the first indication that this isn’t just a quickly cobbled together single player using multiplayer maps. This is a considered, well-designed experience. The later mission where BT throws you from ship to ship is also great fun but the true highlight is the level “Effect and Cause.” It’s so good that it’ll make you wish it was the entire game.

Titanfall 2 features a fantastic use of time travel, specifically for a video game. At the push of a button you move backwards or forwards in time but not space. This means if you kill in the past then bodies appear in the present, or you can use it tactically to switch time in order to run around enemies and reappear behind them, or even just to reload free from combat. It’s not just firefights but traversal it opens up in new ways, wall running from a wall in the past to a wall in the present. And narratively, finding an audio log and figuring out people in the past are talking about something you’re about to do is a clever way to tell the story. Thankfully, time travel still works while piloting BT, leading to yet more cool options: that awkward moment when you’re running around looking for your Titan only to realise you left him in the past.

You could genuinely build a whole game around this time travel mechanic. It’s a shame it’s only a single mission. In the next I kept instinctively pressing L1 to switch time period but nothing happened. But it speaks of the game’s MO of keeping everything short and sweet. Nothing becomes tiresome and nothing out stays its welcome. The game also plays everything straight in a way I found refreshing in a landscape increasingly meta, cynical, or flippant. The story has a simplicity and a sincerity, best personified by BT. The writers easily could have made the Titan quirky or neurotic but I’m glad he’s played straight: a military machine. There’s no funny voice, he’s not cracking jokes, instead he’s serious and sounds like a transformer. And the story, as generic and familiar a story as it is, works because of it.

Titanfall 2 hits all the expected beats but it hits them well. Of course Cooper and BT build a bond and of course BT dramatically sacrifices himself at the end and of course there’s a hint that BT might live on in some other form. It’s not a spoiler to say that because it’s obvious from the very start. The set-up is generic, the factions bland, the villains cliché, and the hero flat. At first, I was disappointed, thought I’d been telling people wrong information for a decade, that the story mode isn’t the hidden gem I’d been proclaiming. But once I got past that, through the opening missions, it’s clear that no, this is still a great little experience. All the great gameplay from the multiplayer is carried over, the mission design is excellent, the time travel level is truly exceptional, it still looks very good, and while the story isn’t anything special it is very well executed. Titanfall 2’s campaign is still worth playing ten years later.