Somebody some day. Hopefully sooner than later.

Titanfall! I’ve been waiting to try this game since its announcement. I don’t think I’ll be owning an Xbox One any time soon so I was glad to hear it was coming to PC and a beta would be available. I love giant mecha and I enjoy playing first person shooters in a short sittings so this seemed like my kind of game. What could go wrong?

After playing the closed beta for many hours, I can’t say it isn’t fun. Being able to run along walls, double jump, hang onto walls and mount Titans brings something exciting to this First Person Shooter experience. It’s really fast paced and there are few dull moments. It accommodates for less than spectacular players as well since you can kill NPCs for points in addition to killing player controlled characters that would probably try to kill you back. The three game modes  showcased with the beta are a blast to play and hopefully with more modes, maps and titans in the full version the game will be even more fun.

Sadly, I don’t think I’m going to purchase the game any time soon or until a nice sale like BF4 had for Black Friday. “But, Khoi, you seem to be enjoying it. Why wouldn’t you buy it?” you might be asking. It’s not without its faults and things that annoy me. I won’t buy a game unless I’ll get a certain amount of enjoyment for the price. If it drops below $35~  I might bite.

So what do I not like about the game so far:

Field of View

Max 90FOV is kinda low for me. I can deal with it in short bursts but otherwise I get dizzy quickly. 110 is the sweet spot for me.

Borderless Windowed

Being a game running a modified version of the Source Engine, I found it odd that enabling borderless windowed mode was not straight forward. In games like CS:GO, L4D2, and DotA2 there’s options readily available to change it to borderless windowed mode in the settings. The normal launch command -noborder doesn’t work consistently either so it’s easier to just use windowed mode and use an external program such as ShiftWindow to get it working like a borderless window.

Multi-Monitor Selection

I have dual monitors and I prefer to game on my second monitor more than my main monitor (less input lag and main monitor often has Skype, music, browser windows, and whatever I happen to being working on at the time open at the same time.) A nice feature of BF4 is the selection of which monitor you would like the game to be displayed on. It helps players not have to use third party programs for games to work well and it’ll lessen the bugs that come with third party programs. I have issues with screen blanking and flickering on the Burn Card page only when the game is on a second monitor. This issue does not apply to other games that I play on the second monitor.

Frame Rate

It feels inconsistent. I can play games like Battlefield 4 on Ultra everything and still get 80+FPS while running the game in borderless windowed mode and streaming but this game seems to dip a lot while not bringing the same level of visual fidelity. Source engine games usually run very well for me so I felt this was odd that I’d have so many stutters and frame drops.

Environments

I don’t know if I’ve been spoiled by other games’ destruction but something about gigantic mecha not being able to crush buildings or blow up the environment to shoot at infantry inside seems kind of weak. The game is fun as is, but some things just feel off without the destruction that comes hand in hand with mecha. Maybe a future installment will afford for environment destruction.

Shotgun

The range is way too far. It can reach maybe 40~ Feet and still kill someone with one shot that isn’t to the head. It’s annoying for those people to just run around shot gunning people while double jumping and going invisible if you turn around and hit them 4+ times with carbine bullets.

Lobby System

I’d like to have a server browser in addition the current lobby system. Matchmaking isn’t fair in the beta (see: Skill Disparity), and sometimes I would spend 10+ minutes looking for other players to play with. Having a server browser would allow every player I want to play with check the ping to the server.

Skill Disparity

Hopefully when the game is released to the masses the skill disparity is less apparent. I’ve been top scorer on my team in close to every match I’ve played and I confess: I’m terrible at first person shooters. Maybe with the small pool of players it isn’t hard to get horribly imbalanced teams in terms of skill. There has never been a close match. Either my team gets smashed or the enemy team lacks even a sliver of hope to win.

VOIP

Maybe my least favorite thing about this game. The sound quality of communications is terrible. It sounds like everybody is talking through their shirt or a muffled filter. There’s also an element of loud static in most people’s speech as well. It’s also hard to mute people while in game. It’s easy to mute while in the lobby but after the rounds start? You can’t mute that annoying man-child who keeps running his mouth or being offensive until the match is over.

And I think that’s about it. It’s a good game besides those things that annoy me, but I’m sure it’ll make a good $35~ game when the price drops. Hopefully DLC isn’t overpriced when it does drop to that price.