PoN: Titanfall

Welcome back to Previews of Note, your bite-sized digest of exciting upcoming games. This column's game was recommended by our very own Support Corps Commander Eifer - Titanfall

Titanfall is a FPS game created by Respawn Entertainment, a development company founded by former Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella, and is to be published by EA in 2014 for the Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows. Titanfall's dedicated PC servers will be running from the Xbox Live Cloud - no real surprise, with Microsoft running the show. What <i>is</i> a surprise is that the developers have chosen to use Valve's Source engine as their foundation - most gamers these days find Source to be a little outdated for their graphical and performance tastes, but the devs have cited familiarity and the ease of obtaining a consistent framerate of 60fps on consoles.

Gameplay is multiplayer-only, with small elements of singleplayer such as NPCs and narrative ingrained in the mix. "Pilots" and "titans", which may evoke Pacific-Rim-esque awe in battle, work together to achieve team-based objectives in fast and furious combat - even on foot, you have the ability to move quick and hard, with double-jump abilities and wall-running.

Visually speaking? The game looks absolutely gorgeous, even to this Source veteran. While promo images make heavy use of the overdone orange/blue dynamic (see: every movie poster in the last two years) the gameplay videos that Respawn Entertainment have provided so far have been enough for Titanfall to win over 60 awards at E3.

In summary: keep an eye on this game. It looks to be living up to the hype.

 Lieutenant Colonel GLaDOS

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