Titanfall 2

I never got a chance to play the original Titanfall, so when the sequel recently released and immediately went on sale for $32 I decided to give it a shot. For the most, it's damn fun and has an excellent balance between lightning fast twitch shooting and the real-time giant robot combat of games like Mech Assault 2, which younger me loved. There's a lot of hemming and hawing about release dates and player counts but I don't want to talk about that right now - instead I wanted to give some early-ish impressions of someone new to the series after about 14 hours of multiplayer experience.

• Tutorials. Where are they? There's a short introduction to basic moving and shooting in the campaign, but nothing similar for multiplayer. Either they assumed most people would be already familiar with the mechanics since they're similar to the first game, they thought people would pick this stuff up in an acceptable amount of time, or maybe I'm just dumb, but boy was I confused for the first 6 hours or so. Here is a rough list of mechanics/gameplay elements that (to my knowledge) are not explained at all by the game and if I think the game dropped the ball or I did:
• The mechanics of "rodeo-ing" a titan - how much damage does it do to them, why do I keep getting killed by a weird cloud of electricity whenever I do it, why is my guy yanking on a battery, why is he now throwing a grenade in the battery hole, etc. Verdict: Respawn dropped this one down a mineshaft.
• Your "tactical" grenade option is on a cooldown, so I just assumed you get one throw per cooldown cycle, right? Ha, wrong. You actually get two - if you look closely at the cooldown icon, it only goes down to the halfway mark once you throw the first grenade. Verdict: My bad, but in my day if something was on "cooldown" that meant you couldn't use it until it, ya know, cooled down. Get off my lawn!
• Remember "Prestige" levels from CoD? They're back, but they're called "Regeneration" and also aren't explained at all. Several rewards like weapon camos and callsigns are given after "Weapon ___ Regeneration" or "Pilot Regeneration" or "Titan ___ Regeneration" without any documentation of what the hell that even means. Verdict: Respawn let me down again here, but to be fair the only time you need to know what "Regeneration" means is when you're doing it, which means you've played this game a lot, so I guess this isn't as big a deal as other stuff

• Weapon variety. Titanfall 2 is very, very fast and the time to kill on the weapons are very fast as well, so death is sudden and potentially without warning. Naturally players having such a high movement speed means that lighter weapons like SMGs and shotguns are disproportionately effective, which is fine I guess, but it also means that precision instruments like sniper rifles and chunky LMGs are effected as well. I'm not saying that they're bad per se, but I wonder how much work was needed to bring these up to the level of the other weapon categories and if this type of weapon variety is even needed. 
• Primary/Secondary weapons. This is definitely the element I most wish was changed about this game. Currently we have ARs, shotguns, SMGs, LMGs, sniper rifles, and grenade launcher-type weapons as primaries which is fine. Secondaries, though, are limited to either anti-Titan weapons or handguns, which is... weird, since the primary weapons are already so effective at killing other players that backup handgun is never needed while being able to chip away at enemy Titans is pretty crucial to giving your team an edge. I doubt this is something they are willing or even able to change at this point but I would've really liked being able to run around with just a pistol and an anti-Titan weapon since they're actually all really cool.

So once you get past the learning curve and settle in, Titanfall 2 is awesome fun. It's also currently on sale down to like 50% of full price, which is insane for a AAA release that is this polished and smooth. If you're into fast paced shooters and/or miss the lack of Mechwarrior-type games we've endured for the last several years, you could do a lot worse for $30.