Titanfall: Assault

~ the last words ~

The Titanfall name stood for one thing: wall-running through a map at speed until a forty-ton mech fell out of the sky onto somebody. Titanfall: Assault was a card game. You placed units at the top of a lane and watched them walk down it, on a phone, in matches short enough to finish at a bus stop.

Respawn announced it on 3 May 2017, developed with a studio called Particle City and published by Nexon. Forbes covered the announcement under a headline that began with the words "Oh Good", which is roughly where the audience was. It soft launched in the Philippines that same month and went worldwide on 10 August 2017 for iOS and Android.

I was in my thirties by then and had never put a gacha game on my phone, so this one passed me entirely. The timing is the interesting part. This arrived between Titanfall 2 in late 2016 and Apex Legends in early 2019, during the stretch when EA was still deciding what the franchise was for, and the answer the mobile spinoff gave was card packs.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually played like ~

Mechanically it was competent. Pilots and Titans came as cards with energy costs, and two lanes ran down the screen toward the opponent's turrets. The Titan drop worked as the ultimate you saved up for, which at least kept the name honest. Eurogamer, reviewing it a few days after launch, used it as evidence for a larger argument about why the series kept struggling: the things that made Titanfall feel like Titanfall were the things a top-down tap-to-place game could not carry.

~ one month's notice ~

The shutdown went up on the game's own Twitter account on 29 June 2018. A month later, on 30 July, all servers closed, and Google Play removed the listing the following day. There was no offline mode to fall back on because there had never been a single-player game underneath it.

Nexon kept publishing. Respawn shipped Apex Legends six months later, and the franchise's one runaway success turned out to be a battle royale rather than anything the mobile team had been asked to build. The casualty was the eleven-month game in the middle, which is the ordinary fate of a licensed mobile spinoff and still worth writing down, because most of them never get an article at all.

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