GotY 2014: #3 Titanfall

With the top 3 being revealed starting today, I want to thank you for reading all of my Game of the Year blogs so far. It has been a lot of fun doing it and I look forward to finishing them up tomorrow and Thursday. Once I finish with my daily blogs, the list of my top 10 will be posted as well. Once again, if you have missed any of my other blogs from this year, click on the links below:

#4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10 and HM

Titanfall

When I started the year, if you had told me that Titanfall would be on my Game of the Year list, I would have called you crazy. The last FPS that I really got into was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the first game in the renaissance of the FPS on consoles. I became pretty good at that since I was playing it every day for at least an hour when I was still in college. After that, I hadn't really played much Call of Duty or other FPS besides the campaigns of some of the Call of Duty's in the past. I got Titanfall because it just seemed like it was totally different from CoD and seemed like it might be enough to get me back into a game like it. I, however, stopped playing it about a month after I picked it up, even though I had bought the season pass.

After a couple months though, I got back in when they announced that the Frontier Defense mode was coming into the game. I love me a horde style mode and the gameplay for Titanfall was still a lot of fun. With the background on my time with this game, lets talk about the gameplay and why this is in my top 3 this year.

This game is one fun game. The way it controls and how the different parts work with each other meld together so well. The movement was such an amazing eye-opener for me that I really don't want to play any other FPS' if they don't have something like what Titanfall has. When you are running toward and building and I know that I can just traverse over the building without having to go around it, I get excited. The animations that happen when you climb over the building just looks really cool as you are clambering over the building. It doesn't look smooth and it has that sort of lived-in feel that they are just doing the least amount of movement required to make their way up the building. As Jeff has said whenever he's taken a look at Titanfall, whenever you get into a Titan it looks really freaking cool. If you just climb in from the front, or you slide from behind and it grabs you, or you jump at it and your Titan grabs you out of the air, to sliding in the top through a hole at the top, they men and women of Respawn did an amazing job of really showing you that Titans are cool and will never not be cool.

We've spent a lot of time in the movement, so let's talk about everything else. The game makes great use of the guns that it has. Some people don't care for the fact that it has so few guns but I don't mind. I actually have tried out all of the weapons, which I normally don't do, so it was nice to be able to not feel pressured to just try out a few weapons and then land on one. The aiming and actual shooting works well, which is to be expected since many of these people worked on Call of Duty 4, which is possibly the best CoD of all time. The various modes are ones that you find in most other games of the same kind. I normally played Attrition but would also play on Pilot Hunter or Last Titan Standing to get some different styles of the game mixed in.

Now, the main reason that this game jumped up my list to this place is because of the Regeneration process. In order to get to the next level of Regeneration, you have to go through various challenges to be able to Regenerate. The challenges are set up so you have to use weapons, ordinance(grenades), Titan weapons and other things to be able to Regenerate. When I first found out about this, I was not excited because it meant I would need to use some guns that I normally don't use, like sniper rifles. My favorite one so far was using the satchel charge(their version of C4) to kill pilots. As I was playing and working my way through this challenge, I was super into cloaking up and then getting as close to the person as possible before I threw it and detonated it. Now, this sometimes ended up with me killing myself and the other person but it was always fun knowing that after they died, they always wondered what the hell happened before watching the killcam. The best thing about it was that whenever I actually got a kill, I would always say "F--- you" and sometimes I would cackle it was an especially amazing kill.

Now, time for the bad news. The first thing is that the community for this game has seriously taken a dive after the release of Call of Duty. On Attrition, there are maybe 3500 people in the world playing it, with most of the players being in America. Frontier Defense, which is maybe the best mode in the game, has around 500-700 people, so I can always get into a game but it would be nice to have more people playing this game. The second thing is that the scopes you get for reaching certain levels of kills are not that great. It's a really weird thing to have happen since scopes and sights are normally supposed to make it easier to shoot the gun but when you get some of the other sights they just aren't as good as the iron sights. The one that I really dislike is the holo-sight for the first SMG you unlock, the R-97. It is a super busy sight that has a lot of different lines and the iron sight is just better for the purpose that it was designed for.

Thanks for reading and come back tomorrow, where the number 2 game will bring a shadow over the middle of the Earth.

HT101