I don’t know if you heard, but Titanfall 2 is a good game. Pretty, pretty good. A lot of has been said about why it’s so good in the almost five years since its release, whether that’s the incredibly verticality, the pacing of matches, or just how satisfying the gunplay is, which Respawn would pretty much carry on over to Apex Legends wholesale. But I think one of the reasons Titanfall 2 is so good is because how good it makes you feel, even when you aren’t. A large part of that comes down to the grunts.
In the real world, the grunts in Titanfall 2 would be a protected species, a bunch of lads so hapless that you expect Eric Idle and John Cleese to come trundling out of nowhere and start doing nonsense. They’re utterly terrible bags of blood who hit you one out of every twenty times, then proceed to poop their pants whenever you deal with some of their mates. They’re like Upham out of Saving Private Ryan, but at least he managed to kill that guy in the end, even though he was just one lad with a rifle and there were like five Germans with guns, but whatever — the boy come good.
The reason why the grunts in Titanfall 2 are so terrible isn’t because their AI is badly programmed or anything like that. It’s because it’s been programmed perfectly to make you feel better about yourself.
I’ve been playing a lot of Titanfall 2 over the last couple of days with it now (temporarily?) out of the grasp of that hacker, and, man, it’s as amazing in 2021 as it was in 2016. There’s no multiplayer FPS that can match the speed and sheer adrenaline-pumping brilliance of Titanfall 2, even now. Not Apex Legends, not Warzone, not anything.
There’s a lot of people who agree with that too, as Titanfall 2 continues to post impressive numbers on Steam, comfortably more than Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1 (the games that “killed” it all those years ago). There’s some beauty in that, even though it seems to be doing precisely nothing to make Titanfall 3 happen.
It appears there’s a lot of people still playing Titanfall 2 on PC from when it first launched, or at least for longer than most. I’m going up against some pretty skilled Pilots who are able to turn me inside out and snap my neck, my little writer’s wrist struggling to keep up with them. I’m never at the bottom of the leaderboards, but I’m nowhere near the top either.
Enter the grunts. Every time I’m feeling a little overawed or inferior, there’s always the grunts to mop up and punch around. Sometimes you just need to get yourself back in a groove, and there aren’t many better ways of doing that than by chucking a grenade at a clutch of them and watching them leap literally four inches away from the blast. Hearing them cry out for help is also a bit of sadistic power fantasy, though I do immediately feel bad and sometimes let them just wander off, presumably to die to ingrown facial hair.
In a smart bit of design, you can also farm grunts to give you your Titan without having to get many Pilot or Titan kills at all. They’re the equalizer for the lower rung of players, a mechanic to give some players a fighting chance without just overtly handing them an advantage. In addition, Attrition (Titanfall 2’s main mode and what pretty much everyone plays) is all about racking up points, and every little helps — sometimes killing a troupe of the silly buggers makes all the difference as to who wins.
So, here’s to you, Titanfall 2 grunts. You’re worse than goombas and could probably be killed by a slightly warm glass of milk. Thank you for being you.
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