Titanfall

When you look at Titanfall, it's easy to see the familiar. Most of the weapons, grenades, and abilities fill well-worn niches. Many of the environments are like the grimy villages and industrial complexes that have hosted countless online battles in dozens of other games. The competitive modes are bog standard. And yet, when you play Titanfall, it's impossible to shake the feeling that you're playing something special.

The key is mobility. Titanfall gives you the ability to leap, climb, and wall-run your way around the map, and these simple actions create an exhilarating array of possibilities. No longer constrained by corridors and stairwells, you and your foes engage in high-flying, freewheeling combat in which the sheer joy of movement makes the familiar feel fresh and vibrant. This novel brand of warfare is enough to heartily recommend the game, but that's not all that this multiplayer-only shooter does well. You also clash with your foes in lumbering battle mechs called titans. These powerful brutes fuel a weightier, more tactical type of combat that intertwines beautifully with the light-footed action, and herein lies Titanfall's triumph: two distinct kinds of combat blending seamlessly together to create chaotic and dynamic battlefields unlike anything you've ever experienced.

So how does this mobility work? As a jump kit-equipped pilot, the stunts you can perform all stem from two abilities: the double jump and the wall run. The first one is self-explanatory and allows you to surmount shipping containers and leap into second story windows with ease. The second one is dependent on the angle of your approach. If you run straight at a wall and leap into it, you're stuck trying to double jump your way to a window or a roof. If, however, you come at a wall from an acute angle, you automatically start running along that wall horizontally. Once you start wall running, your double jump capability resets, and then the fun begins.

If you spot an enemy down an alley, you can wall run straight at him, bouncing back and forth between parallel walls to make yourself a tougher target. If you're trying to cross a courtyard, then double jump off the rooftop, wall run along a billboard, and double jump again to another rooftop. And how did you get on the roof in the first place? Perhaps by wall jumping upwards, back and forth between two buildings, or perhaps by leaping out of a top floor window and double jumping back on to the roof. Though the moves you can eventually perform are complex, the root of every maneuver is those two simple abilities. A solid tutorial puts you through the initial paces, and though it might take a few matches to get a good sense of how your pilot sticks to walls, it's easy to start chaining together impressive feats very early on.

This makes simply moving around the map both a continual pleasure and a constant challenge, as you gleefully try to exploit every billboard, building, and zipline to your advantage. The 15 maps are all rich with opportunities for creative locomotion. Titanfall takes place on distant colonies in the space-faring future, where the polished steel of well-established settlements contrasts with the rusty metal of frontier outposts. Dense urban areas play host to daring rooftop acrobatics, while a corporate enclave provides curving architectural lines for pilots to exploit. Many buildings have open interior spaces as well, so weaving in and out of windows and changing elevation rapidly is par for the course. It's always empowering to learn the maps in a competitive shooter, but this satisfaction is heightened in Titanfall because your expanded mobility means there is so much more to learn.

It also means that your enemies can come at you from almost any direction. Pilots move at a brisk clip, so there's a lot of potential for quick flanking runs and rapid pursuits. They are also fairly fragile, succumbing to a few well-placed shots much like their military-shooter counterparts. This encourages you to be even more aware of your surroundings and to take advantage of one of the more disruptive maneuvers in the game: the wall hang. At almost any time you're running along or jumping onto a wall, you can stop and hang, take aim, and fire. Being able to switch quickly from wall running to guns blazing helps ensure that a mobile pilot is not a vulnerable pilot, and the potential for ambushing players by hanging in unexpected places is nearly endless.

Fortunately, one of the tactical abilities allows you to temporarily see your enemies' skeletons through walls and spot any potential ambushes. The other two--turning nearly invisible and boosting speed and regeneration--round out a trio of powers that have been extensively utilized by other games and aren't initially very exciting. But like so much in Titanfall, these familiar abilities take on new life because the extensive player mobility allows you to employ them in new ways.