Overview
Titanfall 2 is a first-person shooter from Respawn Entertainment that splits its time between two very different kinds of action. As a Pilot, you sprint across walls, chain double jumps, and slide through tight corridors at speeds that make most shooters feel sluggish by comparison. As a Titan, you stomp across the same terrain in a massive bipedal mech, trading precision movement for raw firepower and armor. The game makes both modes feel distinct without making either feel like a compromise.
The campaign follows Jack Cooper, a Militia rifleman who bonds with BT-7274, his late mentor's Titan, after being stranded behind enemy lines. Cooper was never trained to be a Pilot, but the mission doesn't wait for credentials. What follows is a roughly six-hour campaign that uses its central pairing to tell a surprisingly affecting story about trust, duty, and the relationship between a soldier and his machine.
Gameplay and mechanics
The movement system is where Titanfall 2 separates itself from the rest of the genre. Wall-running is not a gimmick bolted onto a standard shooter; it's the foundation every level is built around. Maps are designed with verticality and momentum in mind, rewarding players who chain movement abilities together rather than those who play it safe behind cover. Key mechanics include:
- Wall-running and double jumping
- Grapple hook and other Pilot abilities
- Six distinct Titan loadouts
- Melee executions and Titan rodeo attacks
- Phase shift and cloak abilities for Pilots
Each Titan class plays differently enough that switching between them mid-campaign changes how you approach encounters. BT-7274 can swap loadouts on the fly, which keeps combat feeling fresh even across repeated sections.
What makes the campaign worth playing?
The campaign is genuinely one of the better shooter campaigns released in the 2010s. Respawn built individual missions around specific mechanical concepts rather than stringing together generic corridors, which means each level has its own identity. One mission plays with time manipulation. Another traps you inside a factory that folds through multiple eras simultaneously. These ideas land because the core movement system is strong enough to support them.
BT-7274 deserves specific credit. The Titan is written with enough personality to make the Cooper-BT dynamic feel earned rather than obligatory, and the game commits to their bond in ways that genuinely pay off by the ending. For a shooter campaign, that's rarer than it should be.
Multiplayer and social
The multiplayer builds on the same movement foundation as the campaign but adds the tension of playing against other people who know the systems as well as you do. Pilots and Titans share the same maps, which creates a constant negotiation between infantry play and mech combat. Titans earn their way onto the field through a timer that fills as you play, so matches naturally escalate in scale as they progress.
Game modes cover familiar ground: Attrition, Bounty Hunt, Pilots vs. Pilots, and the highlight for many players, Frontier Defense, a wave-based cooperative mode that puts teams against increasingly difficult AI forces. The multiplayer community has shrunk since launch, but active player counts across PC and console remain consistent enough to find matches, particularly on PlayStation where the player base has held steadier.
Impact and legacy
Titanfall 2 launched in October 2016 between two massive competing releases and was commercially undersold as a result. Its reputation has only grown since then. The wall-running movement system directly influenced Apex Legends and left a mark on how Respawn approaches player mobility across all of its work. On PlayStation Store, the game holds a 4.58 out of 5 rating across 131,000 ratings, which is a more honest measure of its quality than its initial sales figures ever were. At $19.99 and included with EA Play, it remains one of the best value propositions in the shooter genre.