Titanfall's Stunning Successor Is Resurrecting The Xbox 360 Era

After going hands-on with 1047 Games' newest first-person shooter, Empulse, I’m convinced this is the closest we’ll get to a Titanfall 3.

The Titanfall series could have easily surpassed the likes of Halo and Call of Duty as the king of first-person shooters, but after the second game’s release, progress abruptly stopped in favour of the in-universe spin-off APEX Legends.

Years later, there’s obviously no sign of that third game, though Empulse has boldly claimed the mantle.

Stand By For Mech-Fall

You may remember 1047 Games for the critically-acclaimed free-to-play title Splitgate, though Empulse is dropping the experimental portal technology for mechsuits instead.

At Summer Game Fest 2026, I played several matches in both a Team Deathmatch mode and one that resembled Uplink from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. It also gave me some Halo 4 Grifball vibes.

Players get a moveset strikingly similar to Titanfall’s. You can run along walls, float in the air via a short-timed jet thruster, and there’s even a grappling hook that lets you swing around the map.

One feature unique to Empulse, though are paint bombs. These colourful throwables splatter paint on the ground, which grants you different effects when you run across them.

For example, one extends your jump height, one boosts your movement speed, and another will cause explosive damage to enemies. Even the positive effect bombs will work on enemy players, though, so you need to be careful when and where you use them. You don’t want to give the enemy team any advantages.

Then there are the mechs. This is where Empulse actually separates itself from Titanfall, as, rather than each player having their own Titan they can call down partway through the match, each team gets one that’ll spawn after an allotted time.

1047 Games

It’s like the vehicles in Halo’s multiplayer modes. They’ll spawn in at your base and the enemy’s, meaning you can either wait around for yours to arrive or you can try to steal your opponent’s.

Once you’ve clambered inside, you’ll let gigantic bullets fly with a huge machine gun, missile launcher and a superjump that’ll squash enemies who find themselves underneath you at an inopportune moment. There’s also a shield to temporarily deflect incoming damage.

The mech was good fun when you’re using it to rinse players below you, but I got into a few scraps with the enemy’s mech and didn’t find it very engaging. It didn’t feel like there was much skill involved, as most confrontations boiled down to who had the most health when they started, rather than who was the better player. That said, I’m sure a few different loadouts for the mechs will make a world of difference in that regard.

Overall, I thought Empulse was fantastic. Like many, I thoroughly miss the multiplayer days of the Xbox 360, and by extension the PlayStation 3, and Empulse feels like the kind of arcade-y shooter modern gaming has been missing.

It’s not the only game that’s trying to bring back the glory days, of course, but so far it’s doing a damn good job of it.

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