Rifleman Jack Cooper wants nothing more than to be a better soldier. Titanfall 2 opens with Cooper navigating a virtual reality program, learning to shoot, stab and perform acrobatics under the guidance of his mentor, Captain Lastimosa. In this sequence, the player is told that her avatar is, like the game’s audience, very interested in (dynamically, stylishly) ending as many enemy lives as is possible within the confines of the story to come. Cooper is good that way. He’s written to be perfect match for the sort of attitude videogame creators have come to expect from their players. BT-7274, the giant robotic “Titan” Cooper later teams up with, is a mix of puppy dog, father figure, and stone cold killer. The two characters—BT is presented not as weapon, but fellow soldier—are a lot alike. Both wish to excel at what they do. As members of the Frontier Militia, a military group attempting to free a section of the galaxy from the totalitarian grip of the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation (IMC), the duo is fully committed to destroying any opponents. Why the player is meant to take Cooper and BT’s Militia allegiance as “good” is just barely explained. There is talk of the IMC’s ruthless attitude toward human life and willingness to exploit the natural resources of the planets it controls, but this comes later in the game, gleaned through a long, easy to miss audio diary. It’s tempered, too, by the fact that all we see of the Militia throughout the story is its own willingness to kill and destroy. Both sides are sophisticated militaries, neither one simply villainous or heroic.. Titanfall 2 would be more honest if it did away with any attempt at moralizing—if it embraced that it’s a shooter with no real care for the human lives its characters and character-shaped targets are meant to represent. Instead, it tries to elevate itself just a hair above the completely serviceable action movie it very much is, insisting to the player that there is righteousness to the war which it uses as setting. Soon after the game begins, Captain Lastimosa is killed in combat. Cooper, having barely survived the battle, is meant to be at least a little shaken up by this. But Lastimosa’s death—quick cut from an image of him gasping out a few B-movie last words to Cooper’s gloved hands putting the final rock atop a funeral cairn—is perfunctory. It exists only to move the plot along, getting Cooper to take control of BT and set out on a mission to stop the IMC from completing work on a planet-destroying superweapon. Hurrying to compartmentalize this bit of feel-bad sentimentality, Titanfall 2 then gets to work endearing the player to BT and Cooper’s budding relationship. The growing sense of affection the two have for one another (and that the player is meant to feel for the robot) forms the story’s emotional core. In the tradition of odd couple buddy movies, Cooper is a human who says he’s scared or cracks jokes while BT is a stern, logical machine. This dynamic is played at times for laughs, at times to wring heartstrings (a robot programmed for loyalty is pretty dog-like), and in attempt to show how imposing a multi-ton walking weapon can be. In BT’s algorithmic assessments of Cooper’s exceptional combat skills, the human soldier finds the praise he was looking for from Lastimosa and the Militia top brass; the two save each other from mortal danger enough times that the player can almost believe that BT is grateful on a downright emotional level. But the warmth of the central characters’ friendship doesn’t hold up within the context of the rest of Titanfall 2’s story. Moments after Captain Lastimosa’s death, Cooper, having just buried his teacher and now stranded behind enemy lines, sets out to find a replacement battery to power up BT and escape. He runs across cliff walls, jumps between rocky outcroppings high above ground, and fights off vicious local fauna. Soon he hears enemy chatter. IMC patrols are monitoring the area, trying to capture or kill any Militia forces that survived the battle. Cooper shoots a group of them dead within seconds. Titanfall 2 is a game about firing guns at enemies, but it’s worth noting that it’s also a game that emphasizes the player’s incredible agility over prolonged gunfights. Rather than trade shots with tough opponents in body armour, Cooper’s enemies drop at just about the same moment he levels crosshairs over their silhouettes. This makes the pace of Titanfall 2 extremely fast. It’s a game of quick decision-making; it prioritizes an understanding of the battlefield’s terrain above all else. The player is incredibly powerful unless she falls off a ledge, stumbles into a firing range of enemies, or stands still longer than a few moments. Titanfall 2's most potent thrills come from killing en masse, its design centred on making the destruction of enemies astonishingly fast and fluid. The effect, beyond lending the game an exhilarating pace, is to turn Cooper into a sort of demigod and his IMC opponents into glorified ants. (This is especially true in scenes where Cooper pilots the hulking BT into combat against scrambling soldiers, stomping and blasting apart their tiny frames with outsized force.) Though most action game conventions have this effect—regenerating health bars, checkpoint systems that make death an inconvenience at most—Titanfall 2 enhances it dramatically through its combat design and plot focus. Unnamed soldiers refer to themselves as “grunts” in an early scene (maybe a knowing wink); Militia forces all but prostrate before Cooper after he completes seemingly impossible tasks. Nobody matters in comparison with the game’s heroes. Cooper and BT are always faster, stronger, and more resilient. This is most notable in the sole moment the game devotes to fleshing out the IMC’s villainy. Almost every non-grunt enemy is from a mercenary group, but a single IMC figurehead is given a name and motive: General Marder. Though he’s never actually depicted as more than a voice and hologram likeness, Marder explains his army’s purpose in an audio diary found partway through the game. In it, he describes why it’s necessary to build a super weapon and destroy Militia-held planets wholesale. “Human life is abundant,” he says. “And as distasteful as it may sound, human life is expendable.” The IMC’s evil is revealed to be basically utilitarian. It, and General Marder, are willing to spend human lives in order to mine resources for its hungry colonies across the cosmos. They’re willing to annihilate entire planets to defeat the Militia forces. From this viewpoint, killing millions will protect humanity. Life has to be viewed pragmatically. Titanfall 2 doesn’t provide enough information on the stakes and possible outcome of its war that the player can view the IMC’s plan as more than reprehensible on a basic level. It encourages us to instead recoil instinctively. Marder’s plan will kill indiscriminately. His ideas stem from the almost solipsistic viewpoint that says only the heroes of our own stories matter—that the enemy has to be considered as dangerous numbers, not people. In the time it takes Cooper to run from one end of a wall to another, he often kills a dozen enemy soldiers. From BT’s cockpit, a hangar bustling with IMC troops can be obliterated in seconds. We might not expect these characters to have names or recognizable faces, but the complete lack of ceremony that accompanies their deaths is disconcerting, even for a shooter where the player expects a single level’s body count to rise to the hundreds. More worrying is the way these encounters end, Cooper quipping to BT or his robot pal offering a goofy mechanical thumbs up. The buddies have made it through. Their bond grows in proportion to how attached we are to them as characters. But no room is given, through story or combat design, for others to exist outside this warm cocoon. Titanfall 2’s villains are bad because they don’t see their enemies as anything but faceless obstacles. Titanfall 2’s heroes and player are meant to be good for doing exactly the same.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and editor based in Toronto. His work has appeared in Kill Screen, Playboy, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.