Ready For Titanfall: Launch Trailer Has Some Sort Of Plot

I like our medium's rapid growth into more mature subject matter as much as anyone, but that doesn't mean I can't also enjoy man-shoot and robot-biff. In fact, I liked Titanfall quite a bit when I played it during its beta a few weeks back. Now the game is on the verge of being released next Tuesday - sorry, I'm supposed to say it's about to drop from orbit, but it's too trite - and that means the requisite launch trailers have been set loose. They're below. They're marketing. They've got stompy robots in and so I'm powerless to resist.

Here's the live-action TV advert, which has even less in common with what it feels like to play but appropriately sells the fantasy.

Davis, you've got to leave me behind! You're a loose cannon, Davis! But yu're the best gosh damned mech pilot in the 'verse, the MFI need you! Alright, it just occurred to me that the launch trailer had plot in it, but even after watching it twice I've still not registered anything other than that it has fighting and robots and fighting robots.

Although as much as I go on about the robots, it's the free-running foot soldiers I'm most interested in inhabiting. Titanfall balances its two-scale combat by making ordinary people hyper-mobile, able to chain together wall-runs and double jumps into gleeful sprints across level geometry in which your feet never touch the ground. It feels great, and it's perhaps the finest movement mechanic in a multiplayer game since Tribes' slip-and-slidey skiing.

If you want more footage of the actual game and less of the cutscenes and so on, then you should give Nathan a visit. He played and recorded the beta, picking over some of its features.

Titanfall is out March 11th in North America and then March 14th in the UK. We'll have words about it as soon as we have something of merit to say.