Titanfall: Assault mobile strategy coming to Android and iOS next week

Titanfall and Titanfall 2 are pretty polished AAA titles for consoles and PC, which have you don the battle armor of a future soldier that can walk on walls, double-jump in the air, and do ninja slides, as well as pilot a giant war mech. Yeah, it sounds cool on paper, and the second game really did a lot to try and improve on all the criticisms the first one received, yet its playerbase seems to be dropping for one reason or another.

That said, we are a bit befuddled that the franchise is getting its mobile title just now, 9 months after the latest main game has been released and well before anything else has been announced. Anyway, it's called Titanfall: Assault and is more of a card-based real-time strategy than an action game like the titles it's modeled after.

So, what do we mean by card-based? Titanfall: Assault plays a bit like Star Wars: Force Arena — you have pre-made decks of “cards”, which basically represent soldiers or special powers. When in an actual game, you choose which cards to drop on the field, which means you spawn a squad of the selected soldiers or a missile to help them out. Cards cost energy and energy recharges during the match. It's basically the single mechanic that makes the game a “strategy” — you have to make time-sensitive decisions on whether you should burn your energy pool for 1 heavy unit or 3 weak units, then wait for it to recharge and face the same conundrum. Beyond that, you've no control over your soldiers (unlike Force Arena, where you at least control your hero).

Otherwise, the game definitely screams “Titanfall”. The map design, the units, the pilots, the titans — everything is on point, and you will also meet some new units that have been designed specifically for this game. It seems like it will be built on the freemium model, where you need to pay if you want to earn decks of cards faster, but we'll see how it turns out. Release date? In three days – August 10th! You can pre-register for the game if you are on Android and get a bonus titan for your trouble, too.