A few years ago, I was awful at first-person shooters. A friend of mine wanted to play co-op together in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dying Light — a game that’s light on the shooting but heavy on the first-personing — and in order to do that, I needed to complete the prologue, which should have taken around an hour, give or take. But, I played so badly, died so often, and got trapped in shacks surrounded by zombies so frequently, that finishing that short section took most of the night. In fairness to myself, I was playing with an Xbox controller which I hadn’t really used before and kept having to squint at the screen, then down at the controller to figure out which button I was supposed to push. That knowledge didn't make the time pass any quicker, though, and eventually my friend gave up on waiting.
Before that, I had dabbled in shooters in high school. I played BioShock, let a friend of mine destroy me over and over again in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Modern Warfare 2, and offered myself up as the weakest link in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Black Ops zombies co-op. Growing up, I had a hard time making myself try at things that I wasn't naturally good at, so I excelled in my English classes, nearly failed chemistry, and rode the bench for all four years of basketball. Shooters were the same, just another thing I was bad at and felt no need to put effort in at getting better.
But, when I played 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Titanfall 2 on that same friend's Xbox One, that began to change.
I didn't instantly get good. In fact, the same friend watched exasperatedly as I died over and over during BT-7274, the game's first real level after the introductory Pilot's Gauntlet. I didn't die during the Pilot's Gauntlet, because you can't, but I'm sure my times were ludicrously slow.
Despite being bad at it, I loved Titanfall 2. I was getting back into games after some time away at the time, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Effect and Cause, the level where you're handed a device that can warp you between two time periods instantaneously, blew my mind. If there were shooter levels this cool, man, I had really been missing out. So I pushed through, even though certain boss fights felt nearly impossible. I made it to the end, and Titanfall 2 quickly became one of my favorite games ever made. I've played a ton of shooters since then, and only one has had a better campaign. That was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Half-Life 2, so Titanfall 2 is in pretty good company.
It's also similar to Half-Life 2 in that despite an intensely passionate fanbase, it never got a sequel. Respawn seems to have moved on. Titanfall 2 lives on in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends, which is set in the same universe and shares its kinetic approach to movement. It lives on in the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars: Jedi games, which incorporated Titanfall's beloved wall-running. And, it lives on in my hands, which can now find the A button on an Xbox controller without any help from my eyes.