Something very important happened in between the release of Titanfall 1 and the upcoming release of Titanfall 2. That important thing is that Call of Duty Advanced Warfare came out and did it’s job significantly better than the first Titanfall. Sure, it didn’t have big ridable mechs. But it really solidified how futuristic first person shooters should feel. The past weekend Respawn Entertainment ran a technical test for Titanfall 2, and it feels like a piece of the core from the first Titanfall is among the missing.

With the time I spend with Titanfall I learned a few very important things. There wasn’t a SINGLE, not a single issue with any technical aspect of this game. It ran beautifully, no latency in any of my matches and I found matches absurdly quickly. This is all stuff they learned from the first Titanfall, during the Titanfall’s technical tests and on release date, it was a mess. So it’s nice to see that Respawn has figured out their server issues.

I also learned that this game plays surprisingly different from the first one. The controls feel clunkier than before, and it feels significantly slower paced. The thruster packs don’t seem nearly as fast and useful and the wall running also seems substantially slowed down. It also showed me the only bad grappling hook I’ve seen in a video game. It feels absurdly limp and almost useless. Whenever a game adds a grappling hook it’s almost always a positive thing, this is the exception. Something I really enjoyed from the first one was how snappy and quick the game felt at all times, even if it was often erratic.

During the test, they were showing off three game modes. Amped Hardline, which is your standard Domination game mode. Pilot vs Pilot, which you should never play if you’re playing Titanfall in the first place. And finally Bounty Hunt, which is a new game mode that really intrigued me. When you start the match, the team is drawn to a location where there’s going to be a bunch of grunts. When you kill those grunts you get money added to your player. At certain points during the match, the bank will open up. This is when you take the money you’ve earned and you deposit it to your teams score. The team that reaches a certain amount of money first wins the match. While all of this is going on, the other team is still there to stop you from killing these poor helpless grunts. Also, during specific points in the match, higher valued targets will spawn randomly and teams will have to get together to take them down. I had a good amount of fun with this game mode, even if it can get a little hectic at times it’s a neat twist on the stale Horde modes we’ve seen for a long time now.

During this test, they had two maps available and they are making a third one available for the second test weekend. Out of these two maps neither of them had any interesting points in them. Maybe it’s because Overwatch spoiled me with cool looking maps, but they just seem super generic and grey-washed. If you can picture what a generic Titanfall map would look like, I promise you, that’s what they look like.

They also made some massive changes to the mechs themselves. Now each of the mechs have MOBA like abilities that are on cool downs and they even have ultimate abilities. This is definitely a good change and it helps making the mech gameplay more diverse rather than just running around and shooting things. It also makes the mechs feel like much more of a formidable opponent.

I’m excited to see what the future holds for Titanfall, but it seems like the need to make some fundamental changes to how this game plays. Even Respawn Entertainment agrees with me.