Like many Xbox One owners, I participated in the Titanfall beta last week. I haven’t played an unreleased multiplayer game before it hits retail from home since Halo 3, so I was pretty excited to get my hands on Titanfall after hearing all the positive buzz from IGN and Kotaku. Here are my impressions based on what I played.

Titanfall is for everyone
I breathed a sigh of relief after completing my first multiplayer match when I wasn’t annihilated every 30 seconds like in Call of Duty. I feel empowered while playing Titanfall and I know I can have a good time even if I’m in last place. The A.I. bots may be dumb, but they reward players with attrition points that speed up access to your Titan deployment while raising your character level, get more weapons, burn cards, and new Titan configurations. It’s refreshing how accessible Titanfall is to casual multiplayer FPS fans like myself who don’t play multiplayer shooters religiously.

Taking down a Titan as a pilot is cooler then stealing someone’s ghost in Halo 2
Seriously, nose-diving from a building on top of enemy Titan and taking him down single handily with your gun and leaping to safety is badass. And even if you’re on the receiving side of this or facing a self-destruct moment it’s satisfying to parachute out of the cockpit and race to find cover.

Constant movement and no place is a safe haven
Titanfall is all about movement and staying in one spot for too soon is a sure-fire way to get destroyed. Luckily, your movement as a pilot is so varied that it’s a blast to jump up on top of buildings, run along walls, and use your cloaking ability to keep your enemies guessing. Even as a Titan you need to move constantly to replenish your shields and dodge anti-Titan weapons to survive. What I love most about the frantic pace of Titanfall is that it helps alleviate boredom and keeps matches exciting.

It’s exhilarating being a Titan
Hearing the words “stand by for Titanfall” gets my adrenaline pumping and eager to wreck hell on every enemy I see. I had the best experience with the Titan machine gun configuration, but the quad rocket launcher and other gun variations are cool. It’s really awesome dashing across the battlefield and playing cat and mouse matches with other titans and absolutely destroying ground pilots. Equally awesome is the melee move where you yank pilots out of their self-destructing Titan before they try to escape.

Cool tutorial and epilogue
Titanfall has an old school tutorial mode similar to Halo and the older Call of Duty games that do a good job if teaching you how the game mechanics work. It works wells and by the time I finished the tutorial sequence, I felt more confident to play competitively with other people. Besides the tutorial, there’s also a cool epilogue sequence after the end of each match where you and your teammates race to the extraction point before your enemies annihilate you. It’s a cool way to end the game and a unique idea I haven’t seen in FPS before.

While I won’t be picking up Titanfall on day one since I don’t typically play multiplayer shooters online. I’ll definitely be picking it up when it drops in price, and I can’t wait to see the final version with the rumored monsters. Also playing the beta makes me really want a single-player Titanfall game, and I hope Respawn considers it for the inevitable Titanfall 2. I wholeheartedly recommend Titanfall to all FPS fans and think it’s a welcome breath of fresh air for the genre and will invigorate first-person shooters going forward.