Titanfall and Killzone

In the days after I finished the Titanfall 2 singleplayer campaign I started getting this nagging sense that I had played something similar to it in the past. Obviously some of the game mechanics like wall running I had seen in other games, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. The game’s universe didn’t seem a likely culprit either since I’ve hardly played any games with giant robots in them. For a day or two I couldn’t figure out what it was about Titanfall 2 that I had experienced elsewhere, but then the answer came to me. Titanfall 2 shares a particular characteristic with the Killzone games, which are another series of first-person shooters, and unfortunately the thing they share is a negative trait. Both Titanfall and Killzone are set in futurist sci-fi universes that have some pretty interesting lore, but their games don’t do the best job of utilizing that lore to tell good stories from their universes. While the stories told in the Titanfall and Killzone games that I’ve played aren’t terrible, they could have been so much better. Titanfall does have a large advantage over Killzone, however, in that we’ll probably get at least one more Titanfall game, whereas the Killzone series is probably dead, (though I’d like to be wrong about that) so Titanfall will get another crack at telling a good story. I’m not expecting Titanfall 3’s singleplayer campaign to have a storytelling on par with games like The Last of Us or Spec Ops: The Line, and Titanfall 3 will probably be multiplayer-focused like Titanfall 2 was, but I do hope they step up their efforts and hire some good script writers to deliver on Titanfall’s story potential.