I was lucky enough to be at E3 (sigh, remember E3?) the year Titanfall was revealed. Respawn Entertainment was confident it had changed the shooter genre forever, and so was I. Sadly, Titanfall didn't make the impact we had hoped for. I have about as much hope of winning the lottery as I do seeing a third Titan fall game. But its DNA runs all the way through Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
This year's annual COD installment features wall-jumping, tactical sprinting, and omnidirectional movement. Any pretenses of realism have been scrapped. With Battlefield 6 opting for an experience much more grounded in reality, the divide between the two styles of gameplay couldn't be different.
That said, I had a huge amount of fun in the Black Ops 7 beta. You can attack or defend from nearly any angle you can perceive. It is pure arcadey video game, and I suspect it will do well in the era of Tiktoks and YouTube shorts.
I'll be honest, sometimes my favorite thing to do is an "old man" move of ducking into a corner, letting that eager jackrabbit run right past me and then shooting them from behind. When everyone is running around like The Flash, the move Drax The Destroyer described in Guardians of the Galaxy can work. Your very slow movements are almost imperceptible.
Would I trade this sequel for another Titanfall? In a souped-up super soldier heartbeat, but I'm resigned to that likely never happening. In the current gaming climate, the biggest innovations are often small things cribbed from games that were just too far ahead of their time. COD's unstoppable juggernaut status lets it try a few things that a new game can't always pull off.
And while there are no giant battlemech killstreaks, Black Ops 7 at least has some robot dogs to send after enemies.