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Titanfall is one of my favourite FPS series of all time, and I'll forever be bitter that EA canned it at its peak. It's not Titanfall 2's fault it was sent to the slaughter being released between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Actually, that's EA's fault. That frustration lives on all these years later, and with no hope in sight from EA—or any other AAA studio wanting a piece of the pie—it's been up to indies to give us our dose of mech-infused movement shooter.
Enter ShatterRush, a spiritual successor to Titanfall developed by two-person dev team Tetra Studios over the past year. You can download a pre-alpha build on Steam, which Tetra actually describes more as "pre-pre-pre alpha" when you boot it up. Textures and sound effects are very barebones right now, obviously, but ShatterRush has the sauce.
You'll start in a familiar speed-running tutorial where you're taught the controls through an obstacle course and encouraged to go for a high score. You see what I mean? It's unapologetically Titanfall. After that, you can play online.
Even this early in development, movement is fluid as you slide at Mach 10, run on walls, and grapple hook to the heavens. You can even swap your grapple for a dash, stim, or jetpack—that last one's a blast.
I instantly got back into the Titanfall rhythm of jumping between walls while raining bullets down on my enemy's head, or launching myself at an enemy like a cannonball with a shotgun. While maps are generally visually basic, they're cleverly designed to encourage this kind of slick movement to get the jump on players.
And just like Titanfall, you'll be slowly charging up your pilotable mech while you're running and gunning. Stand by for Titanfall:
You could swap your mech out for airstrikes, but why would you ever do that? Your Guardian Mech has massive machine guns and rockets, it can dash, and you can even stick your hand out to block bullets like my beloved Vortex Shield. When your mech's on its last legs, tug the ejection handle and get outta there, blowing up any poor sods nearby.
Of course, so far this is all sounding like a low-budget copy of Respawn's iconic shooter, more or less. And that's not a bad thing—I want more Titanfall—but ShatterRush actually has a unique trick up its sleeve: destruction.
Taking a page out of Battlefield and The Final's playbook, environments are fully destructible. It's so cool to call your mech down on a rooftop and have it crash through the floors. Sure, right now it's a little buggy, and you'll often get stuck, but being able to crack open buildings to make new paths or simply for the fun of it never gets old. I can see the vision, and it's a good one.
The developers explain that they update the game roughly every two weeks. In fact, it was updated while I was playing it to tweak a map, make mechs more tanky, and various other bits. ShatterRush is in its infancy, but I'm on board and interested in where it goes from here.
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