Titanfall 2 is a game about war. This simple but loaded assessment says a lot about Titanfall 2. It says that it is primarily a game about murder, which goes without saying for every war game ever made. It says that it is a game with a simple “good vs. evil” narrative, where players can be assured that they are stalwartly filling the role of “good,” and that every single one of the nameless, faceless AI aggressors are by extension filling the role of “evil.” This way, the player is justified in carrying out every single act of murder and brutality. None of this is specific to Titanfall 2. All war games adhere to these rules, from Call of Duty onward. Even games like Spec Ops: The Line, which strain so hard to convince you that war is bad you can feel the developers’ ocular blood vessels bursting, revels in its adherence to the war game formula: Murder, power, and dehumanization propel every virtual bullet out of the rifles glued to our hands. Titanfall 2 is also a game about giant robots, specifically within the context of war. The eponymous giant mechs, commandeered by the game’s elite “pilots,” are essential fixtures of the game’s fictional war between a Big Bad Government and the Ragtag Militia Band that opposes it, filling the role of heavy artillery and exposition dump all in one fell swoop: Every time we receive significant story bits in Titanfall 2, it comes through the vocoder of BT-7274, the Hooch to protagonist Jack Cooper’s Turner. Somewhat alarmingly, despite the game being a war game—the most infamously impersonal style of shooter—and starring a giant robot—often the most impersonal type of character—Titanfall 2 is a thesis on how war can be humanized. This is both a good and a bad thing. First, the bad. Titanfall 2 is a war game that tries hard, at least in some respects, to be about something other than war. But given its paper-thin plot—the aforementioned evil government being fought by the downtrodden militia forces for reasons that are never clearly stated—the way it accomplishes this is by turning itself into a buddy cop drama starring Cooper and BT, a zany odd couple-style pairing of “human emotion” and “cold robot intellect.” In fact, nearly all of the jokes in the game stem from the dichotomy presented by Cooper and BT. When BT offers to literally throw Cooper across a yawning chasm, we’re supposed to laugh because that’s a crazy thing for a person to agree to, but as far as BT is concerned, it’s the most logical choice in the given scenario. The game’s end, culminating in BT’s self-sacrifice to save his pilot, is meant to be the apex of this relationship. The game glosses over the fact that BT’s third directive that he’s programmed to be incapable of ignoring is “protect the pilot,” meaning that this action is not noble, it’s simply a product of programmatic inevitability. But for all its superheroisms, Titanfall 2 is also a surprisingly human game, which is alarming considering it’s mostly about giant robots. The burgeoning relationship between unlikely partners Cooper and BT has been touted as an emotional touchstone of the game, but in reality is just the tip of the iceberg that this game explores in terms of its humanization of war. Cooper himself—the player analogue—is already more of an independent person than the vast majority of game protagonists who have come before him. He has a name and, more importantly, a voice. Players are still given rudimentary “dialogue trees”—instances where they can select a prewritten response for Cooper to utter in the conversation he’s having. Unlike most other games, however, Cooper does not exist solely in the hearts and minds of players. He also exists in their ears. Cooper has a voice. A gift bestowed to an elite group of shooter protagonists. (Not even Gordon Freeman can claim such a feat.) The decision to endow Cooper with vocal cords of his own must have been an intentional one, since many shooter protagonists can go entire hours-long campaigns without so much as a grunt. The effect of offering players a button to push, and then pairing that button with a fully voiced line of dialogue, is to establish Cooper as an independent character. It isn’t just Cooper who enjoys the benefits of humanity. The game’s antagonists, soldiers in the enemy Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation aren’t the faceless grunts we’ve come to expect from other shooters. They speak—even with different accents. They wear body armor and helmets, but their faces aren’t obscured. We see that they are mostly young men, some white, some black, all just present on the planet Typhon (where the game is set) to do their job. As you are there to do yours. In general, Titanfall 2’s approach to war and its portrayal is casual to the point of playfulness. The level design is approached in such a way as to highlight and emphasize the extreme mobility of the pilots. Players have a variety of acrobatic trickery at their disposal, and as such, wall runs, double jumps, and falls from great heights are routine. As often as not, a given level’s challenges revolve around traversal as much as combat. It sets the game apart from the rest of the more or less interchangeable hyperrealistic “combat simulators,” but it also has the effect of diluting the severity of what the player is doing. Cooper may be an elite commando operating alongside one of the most efficient killing machines in the galaxy, but on missions with BT he seems almost blithe, as though he’s running an obstacle course in which dozens of people happen to die violently. This is the central paradox of Titanfall 2. For a game that seems so intent on painting its cast—protagonists and antagonists alike—with as human a brush as possible, it also plays incredibly fast and loose with life. Cooper racks up a body count in the dozens each level, while BT itself stomps out—literally—opposing forces with striking efficiency. Some of the most alarming moments of the game are when we get to see BT function as it’s intended to. Chatting with my pet robot friend and cracking jokes, only to round a corner and watch it smash an IMC soldier into a pulp before flinging another one bodily across the map somehow just felt wrong. Unlike many other war games, Titanfall 2 is not about its central conflict. I couldn’t even tell you what the primary struggle between the IMC and the Frontier Militia is about. Instead the game chooses to use its central conflict as a backdrop against which to develop a relationship between two specific characters. And it almost works. The problem is Titanfall 2 keeps falling back into its niche as a war-based first-person shooter. The tension between the intimate immediacy of the Cooper-BT relationship and the detached wholesale slaughter that composes the bulk of the game’s action lends the game a striking, surreal quality. Its attempts to humanize its enemies are offset by the game’s overwhelming willingness to murder them en masse without so much as a word of reflection. It operates under the premise that large-scale carnage is somehow more acceptable if you get to know your victim before putting a rifle round between his eyes.

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Patrick Lindsey is a Boston-based game critic who likes to focus on narrative and thematic design. In addition to cohosting the Bullet Points podcast, he also co-edited SHOOTER, an ebook anthology of critical essays on shooting games. Follow him on Twitter @HanFreakinSolo.