[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5sqPxbLmIU]
You can’t overestimate the importance of Titanfall to the Xbox One, a game Microsoft’s been hyping (along with the media) like nothing else since it unveiled its new console last May. Developer Respawn’s multiplayer-only first-person shooter is the brainchild of Jason West and Vince Zampella, both formerly of Infinity Ward, the studio that spawned Call of Duty. This is their first game, post-Call of Duty, and all the brouhaha around their departure aside, they left on a high note, game-wise, so expectations are ridiculously high.
The idea of putting players inside giant robotic suits and letting them slug it out is at least decades old, and “first-person multiplayer shooter arena” is synonymous with “old hat,” but Titanfall‘s aiming to change things up by doing for first-person shooters what you might argue BioWare did for MMOs with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: bringing narrative gravity to haphazard-by-definition multiplayer mob-play.
That, and you can run on walls.
March 11
(Also for Windows, Xbox 360)