"Prepare for Titanfall," says the logistics officer in BBC English over voice-comms. As if it's possible to prepare for this game.

The first thing you notice is how good it all looks. Facial animations, textures, the colour palette; the whole thing is gorgeous. And if you're in the know, the second thing to strike you is that you're looking at a modified Source Engine. When Titanfall comes out next year, it will be running on a decade old engine - and it still looks the shit.

When the round begins you’re shown a brief scene detailing your mission which is different, depending on which side of the conflict you're on. This is part of Titanfall's goal -- to blend multiplayer and single-player into a single construct that blurs the line between the two. Interestingly, the team at Respawn hasn't fixed the player to one place during this scene - this is great, because it means you're not stuck watching a scene you might have already seen play out.



As a pilot -- a superhuman warrior, equipped with a jump jet -- you're able to move better than other people. You can double jump, you can wall run, you sprint faster and you don't appear to suffer from falling damage. As a result, you're able to test the boundaries of the map design to see just how fast you can get from point A to point B, and it's here that you see something very close to perfection.

Many buildings are laid out normally -- they're residences in Angel City, the location for this battle -- but a few exist at the furthest reaches of your pilot's capabilities. As a result, if you want to stay moving above the battleground you've got to time your jumps exactly so, and the map design appears to be built around accommodating as much of this as possible. It's strongly reminiscent of the trick-jumping which eventually became a necessity when playing Quake online -- being able to master movement will be a major skill differentiator when the game hits the wild.

This sort of easy to learn, challenging to master design is the very foundation of Titanfall. AI soldiers -- not Titan pilots, just normal soldiers -- cover the map as you fight. Superficially they present players with something to shoot when they're not fighting Pilots, but when you get more skilled they offer you the opportunity to build towards combo kills, earning more XP for your efforts.

Fighting other Pilots is where the real XP is at, of course, and here the game resembles Call of Duty, but with a vertical twist. In CoD if a player catches you by surprise you're as good as dead, but you can manage this by knowing your map and watching for chokepoints. In Titanfall the player is able to leap up and over barriers, and unless you're camping inside a building you're unlikely to find a chokepoint your enemy can't easily overcome.

This adds a great deal of tension to the experience as instead you have to keep moving as staying still leaves you open to ambush, but it does put a large amount of emphasis on high-ground superiority.

Fortunately, Titans exist in the game to force players out of their comfortable high-hides.

Titans, the game's signature feature, are massive robots standing at least three times the height of a human. They come equipped with a variety of weapons -- on the show floor at Gamescom we saw Rocket Launchers, Grenade Launchers and Heavy Machine Guns. They’re also heavily armoured. When your Titan is ready to launch, it's the sort of thing you want to do immediately.



If you die after calling for “Titanfall” but before getting into the massive machine, it can operate in a sort of "AI" mode to protect itself until you return, but it's not a terribly efficient fighter (at least not nearly as good as it will be with you inside it), so it's better to make sure you call on your mech after securing an area.

Fighting from within the Titan is different. You move and turn a lot slower than you do as a Pilot, and you can't jump -- instead you have a Dash move, which means you still feel moderately vulnerable. As a result, I found this forced me to attack at all times -- I kept moving; closing the distance on my enemies so that I wouldn't be found in a vulnerable position for too long.

During my matches I favoured the Rocket Launcher. It fired four rockets, which spiraled stylishly as they left the barrel, doing damage to both Titan and Human alike. Leaning heavily on the Dash move I would attack other Titans after flanking them, using my minimap to find their side or rear. This way, they'd either have to turn and face me -- copping a barrage of rockets and allowing me to get closer -- or they'd have to run, usually towards my teammates (all equipped with weapons to deal with Titans).

Usually, they'd stand and deliver, and I was able to get many execution kills this way. After a Titan takes enough damage it gives the Pilot the opportunity to eject and, if you're close enough in your own Titan when this happens you rip the enemy pilot from their machine and crush them in your mechanical fist.

The mode we were playing was called Attrition, but it was really just a fancy name for Team Deathmatch -- kill more of the enemy than they do you before the timer runs out and you win. Titanfall brings a twist to multiplayer though, by way of an Epilogue to the battle. You see, if you win, you then have 30 seconds to hunt down and kill any remaining enemies -- a Sudden Death mode, where the losers struggle to get to an escape ship (or the ultimate form of teabagging -- Ed.).

The rewards for killing your enemy in this mode are huge -- you get six times the normal kill XP per Pilot you stop escaping, and they get (I'm told... I never lost) 4000xp if they get away (you get 500xp for a Pilot kill usually). As you can see, the Epilogue can offer huge rewards, and it may stop players from leaving when the going gets tough.

Players use XP for unlocking weapons -- for both Pilots and Titans -- but Respawn weren't prepared to detail the progression system at Gamescom. What I can say is that both Titans and Pilots have loadouts and, like Call of Duty, players will start with a number of set loadouts available to them before they eventually get to create custom ones.



In summary though, Titanfall is spectacular. It looks gorgeous and is amazing to play, but it's not without its challenges. The AI is woeful. I watched, often, as it failed to react to my presence even as I gunned down its teammates just metres away. I asked Abbie Heppe, the Community Manager at Respawn Entertainment, whether the team planned on upping the difficulty.

"Part of it is the purpose that they serve in the game,” she explained. “We want the game to be accessible both to the people who are going to find all the depth to it... and to people who are just starting. And you want them to feel good when they're playing, and part of that is being able to destroy easily a whole bunch of AI -- but you'll also be able to use them to sort of follow the tide of battle."

Obviously multiplayer games traditionally don't need fantastic AI (though if Quake 3 could do it, I'm not sure an excuse exists anywhere), but if the team at Respawn truly wishes to meld single-player and multiplayer experiences, they'll need to draw on at least a competent AI. People don't remain 'new' at a game for long.

Other than that, Respawn needs to confirm more about how it will handle elements like server browsers and dedicated servers -- obviously the Xbox One will have dedicated servers, but Abbie responded that they’re “not talking about that at this time" when I asked her about those elements on PC.

Still, there's a good deal of time between now and when the game drops, and my concerns pale in comparison to my hopes. It's been six years since Vince Zampella and Jason West combined to herald the dawn of the Modern Warfare age of shooters -- there were others before it, including the phenomenal Battlefield 2, but Call of Duty 4 defined how we played shooters for almost an entire generation.

If they want to usher in a new age -- one with freaking giant robots you get to pilot -- I'm ok with that.