8 reasons using Titanfall's Titans is just brilliant

This might seem an odd point to start on, but trust me, it’s important. The reason? Your attachment to your big robot buddy adds an extra level of fun that filters down through everything else, coating every element of Titan-use with a warm, sticky, golden layer of delicious satisfaction.

There’s just something wonderfully loveable about the way the Titans are presented. Between their massive but not unrelatable size, their pleasingly stompy but altogether human animation, and their deliriously giddy arrivals on the battlefield (“Daddy’s home!”, they seem to yelp, after enigmatically hurtling down from the sky. “Who wants to smash some stuff up?” And then they scoop you up into their faces, and away you merrily skip to cause havoc), the Titans aren’t just vehicles or tools. They're big robotic playmates just waiting to rocket-punch their way into your life and whisk you off for a fun day out.

Do not go into Titanfall thinking, as I at first did, that its mighty metallic warriors are simple blunt instruments. These noble, robotic knights are not simply to be smashed repeatedly into the enemy until exploding, like some mere killstreak reward, or the hastily grabbed small dog of a nearby old lady in a January Sale crowd. No, piloting a Titan is a complete, nuanced game all of its own.

The first thing you need to learn is how to manage your horizontal boost power. Although they’re fast as standard, Titans are nothing without it, particularly when fighting each other. Powered by a regenerating, two-step gauge (giving you up to two, omni-directional boosts to combo together at any given time), dashing is key to long-term, tactical play. A well-timed boost will dodge rockets, sidestep Titan punches, and turn a map’s buildings into a fast-flowing three-storey cover system. You can spot a rookie (or just stupid) Titan pilot straight away. They’ll be the only one not rollerskating everywhere. If your play-style makes you look like someone’s recreating a ‘90s tampon commercial with actors made out of washing machines, you’re doing it right.

If you don’t mind feeling like a great big bastard, you can use your jolly grey robot friend as the bait for a great trap. Hop out of the cockpit, and he’ll continue to fight the good fight on his own. Alone. As you run away and leave him. But he understands. It’s okay. He knows that you have to do what you have to do, and those aren’t tears in his eye-cameras, but condensation from a nearby explosion.

But then, as long as you leave him in guard-mode, you can keep running away from him. He’ll longingly watch you as you go, but that’s fine. He’s probably just doing so for your safety, rather than out of heartbreak. And because Titans are always a massive draw of attention, and because every nearby enemy player will be too lustful for his noble, sacrificial death to notice that you’re not in him, they’ll all charge at your Titan like murderous Lilliputians. And then you can kill them all from the safety of cover. Particularly easily, if you have the auto-targeting Smart Pistol. If he survives, you can always switch your Titan to follow-mode, and have him come joyfully bounding over to you like a big robot Labrador. But he’ll probably die instead. And although you won’t hear them over the sound of gunfire, his last words will be a heavily distorted “Iii looooovve yoooo….”

Titans are not just about smashing things up. They’re great at that, of course, but to treat them as no more than walking tanks is like putting Stephen Hawking in charge of accounts at a local garage. To jump into a Titan’s cockpit and fire up its display is to open up a sprawling horizon of eclectic possibilities. Okay, all the possibilities are basically really violent, but imagine some rivers and lakes as well, for the sake of this metaphor.

Want to turn around an attritional choke-point battle? You can do that, no problem. Want to lead the charge on a base-capture? Play it right, and your men will rally around you and immediately turn the tide. Want to go on patrol, covering a perimeter around the map in order keep enemy numbers down? Perfectly viable tactic. Want to act as a guard-dog on a captured base? Hell, want to program your Titan to act as a guard dog as you run in to capture a base? You can do all that and more. Including an impromptu jet-powered boxing match-cum-Royal Rumble with any other Titans on the map. You know that sounds good.

Never too frequent, never too rare, the Titans would get a double-thumbs up from Goldilocks any day of the week. She’d just bloody love them. Reiterating the point that Titans are not killstreak rewards, you will get one during every round you play, guaranteed. Several, probably. Initially primed to drop at the end of a two minute timer, you can speed them along slightly by doing big damage to the enemy team. But however you play, those apocalyptic ground-stomps are going to be raining in thick and fast.

That said, the Titans’ timing is set up brilliantly so as to never dominate the match. Although they come in frequently, Titanfall’s moment-to-moment pacing is so jammed with brilliant things to do and rapidly evolving, emergent set-pieces to be part of that in even just a minute or two on foot you can get involved in a glut of cool stuff. The fact that you have the arrival of your Titan ticking down as an ambient bonus is just a wonderful background pleasure, building its own tailored pacing to the ebb and flow of your own personal game. Even better, you can hold off their launch for as long as you like, making them as big or small a part of your game-plan as you like.

You hear that? Mist. And they can stamp on people. And pull them out of their cockpits, if you manage to finish off their Titan with a ballsy melee attack. And even crush them to death if you time your Titan-drop well enough.

But the main point is that punch. You can even use it to bro-fist your fellow Titans in celebration if you get your spacing right. Bro-fisting robots. Yeah.

So that's my overview of your big robot buddies. Sound fun? Better than you expected? Or do you have any other Titan-based notes or anecdotes from the beta you'd like to share? If so, put them in the comments and get the conversation going, before I start dropping accidental rhymes in any more sentences. It's not my fault, It's an illness in a way.

And while you're here, why not check out Everything else we know about Titanfall? And then maybe have a look at my editorial addressing the question of If Halo 5 misses 2014, will Titanfall really be enough?.