The first Titanfall arrives on Steam, utterly broken
Stand by for Titanf-- oh.
When you're dropping heavy machinery from orbit, a few dings and bangs are to be expected. Unfortunately, Titanfall's long-overdue arrival on Steam left it more than a little smashed up. Early reports from the mech battlefields suggest the 2014 game is pretty much unplayable, locking its fascinating experimental multiplayer campaign behind server issues and broken software.
Respawn Entertainment's multiplayer-only debut quietly dropped onto Steam this week. Unfortunately, as our pals at Eurogamer discovered, it's arrived in a pretty unplayable state, quickly racking up a negative review aggregate.
Now, it's not shocking that a multiplayer-only game from over half a decade back would be hard to play. But Titanfall's problems don't begin and end with low player counts. Steam reviews point to a game plagued by server issues, with folks frequently getting booted out of matchmaking - not ideal, when even the game's tutorial requires connecting to a server.
Others note that the game will falsely claim they're missing DLC map packs, despite it being impossible to pick up Titanfall in any form besides the Deluxe Edition. Even should you get through all those hurdles, it sounds like the game's audio is busted, with several reviews reporting a "staticky" buzz in place of normal sound effects.
It's a right shame, too. While Titanfall 2 is a phenomenal thing, I've always had a soft spot for the first game's ambition in trying to marry storytelling with multiplayer deathmatches - even if it didn't quite land as well as Respawn may have hoped. I hate to say it, but I don't see Titanfall getting the same pleasant playerbase revival enjoyed by its sequel following its own Steam drop.