"We’re not trying to build Titanfall 3," Empulse CEO says, though its’s scratching my wallrunning FPS itch all the same

"We wanted it to be more about movements"

Empulse developers 1047 Games are known first for their Splitgate series of Portal-inspired arena shooters, and perhaps known second for a daft red hat. At last year’s Summer Game Fest, CEO and co-founder Ian Proulx took to the stage to pitch Splitgate 2 in an awkwardly tone-deaf 'Make FPS Great Again' cap, the sartorial power and reactionary tubthumping of which proved ineffective upon the game’s fortunes, even after Proulx’s apology.

Empulse, which launches into early access today (following an introductory Steam Next Fest demo), thus has a fair amount riding on it. It carries both the need of 1047 to brush off Splitgate 2, baggage included, and the weight of comparison – partly self-invited – with the outstanding parkour FPS/mech combat melding of Titanfall. Yet after a few hours with that demo, it does at least feel like Empulse is starting in the right place: less publicity stuntage, more snappy movement-shootering.

First, though, Proulx himself wants to clear something up. "We're not trying to build Titanfall 3," he tells me in a call. "I've seen headlines of, like, 'It's a Titanfall spiritual successor,' and we didn't set out to do that. What we set out to do is to build a great movement shooter, and obviously we are inspired by games like Titanfall and Black Ops III, but it is quite a bit different.”

The similarities to Respawn’s roboshooters aren’t exactly skin deep. Empulse matches are highly dynamic 6v6 arena scuffles where most time is spent sprinting along walls, sliding through chokepoints, or boost-jumping between buildings. Very much in the Titanfall vein where running across flat ground, like a wuss, will get you killed as surely as any whiffed shot or mistimed reload. After a while, the purely human vs. human combat is complicated by the additional threat of mechs, which operate as suspiciously Titanesque first-person battlesuits.

Nonetheless, Empulse does put its own twists on the pilot/mech formula, and what it does borrow more directly from Titanfall... well you have to say, it recreates it well. The parkour, for instance, has the same sense of weight – and the same wallrun-aiding stickiness when you hurl yourself at anything upright – that made Titanfall’s the best in its class, a keenly tuned balance between tangible heft and slick agility. Bouncing around the maps, however blandly industrial they are in the demo build, is a genuine pleasure. And it all helps to produce a similarly challenging, if never dull, flavour of vertical, fully three-dimensional shootouts.

Proulx points to the more Splitgate-styled, hipfire-heavy gunplay as a differentiating factor, and to its credit – though I wouldn’t mind a bit more bullet impact response – this does serve a role in keeping the pace high, encouraging aggression by declining to punish movement with inaccuracy. Though a much bigger difference is how the mechs work: a few minutes into each match, two will spawn on the map for anyone to use, making them more of a prize to fight over than the per-player allocations of Titans.

While I still miss the custom-specced Tones and Monarchs that propelled me through a lengthy Titanfall 2 career, as well as the drastically game-altering dynamic that comes with having twelve superweapons on the field at once, Proulx argues this was an intentional limitation aimed at keeping the focus on pilot play. "We wanted it to be more about movements, with mechs serving as sort of this power spike" he explains. "So like in a Halo-style game, you know, you're fighting over the rocket launcher to gain that advantage, and you get those spikes throughout the match. That's kind of the feeling we want, that you're playing a game focused on movements.

"Every few minutes, a couple of mechs are spawning, and you get this heads up, so that there's now a pull from the whole lobby to fight over it, to get that temporary power advantage."

Another Titanfall departure, albeit also one inspired by an existing game, comes in the form of Empulse’s PAINT (Plasma Activated Infusion of Nanotech) grenades. Cribbing from Portal 2’s gels, these ‘nades are no good for damage, but will coat the blast radius in usefully buff-granting goop. The default PAINT speeds you up for nimbler freerunning, for example, while others boost jump height or deliver AoE healing.

For Proulx, it’s an attempt to address a perceived lack of more outlandish gadgetry in FPS games, including his own. "We feel like it's something that Splitgate 2 fell short on," he says, "and I think it's something a lot of games fall short on, where they sort of viewed these equipments as an afterthought of, like, okay, yeah, you're going to throw in a grenade because every game's got a grenade. You're going to do a stim shot because every game's got a stim shot.

"And when we set out to do Empulse, we're thinking to ourselves, okay, everything needs to be built around movement. And we don't want to just copy/paste, you know, and equipment is an opportunity for us to do something different. We could just do frag grenades and stim shots, etcetera, or we could do something that hasn't been done."

Except in Portal 2 or its student game inspiration Tag: The Power of Paint, of course. Though in a combat setting, the lack of precision to these status effect bombs can produce some enjoyably preposterous fights. In one match, my entire team had amassed to defend a control point, the only obvious entrance to which (for those without the wherewithal to fling themselves through a window) was a single empty doorframe. Alas, my muscle memory flung out a speed PAINT grenade as if it were a conventional frag, daubing the entire gap in movement-boosting emulsion. Cue a barrage of supercharged kneesliders, the enemy team all too happy to exploit my misclick and overwhelm us with zooming gunmen.

The moments of superhuman slapstick are as encouraging as they are entertaining: a spark of the distinct character that Empulse will need to cultivate if it’s to avoid being dismissed as a mere mashup of two superior games. I hope it can, because what I’ve played so far has been, above all else, fun. Not just on the basis of 2016 nostalgia, either.

Unfortunately, for Proulx, I still had to ask about the hat. Is it still his view that first-person shooting is in a rough spot?

"I think I would refine my messaging!" he laughs. "I wouldn't say that it's in a rough spot. Like, I think there are great games. Like Marathon, honestly – I think it's an underrated game, I think it's really fun. But what I would say is there are specific genres within the FPS genre, or sort of subgenres, that I feel are underserved, and in this case, movement shooters.

"Like, I genuinely do wish we could have Titanfall 3, that is one of the things that I stand by! But for me I think there's subgenres that I wish we could see more of, movement shooters being one of them, and obviously with Splitgate... like, arena shooters is another subgenre that I wish we had more of. So I think there's truth to the message still, that I stand by, which is that I would love to see some of these subgenres gain more traction. And I'm hoping that Empulse can do that, because it's a great genre, and it's a really fun game, y’know, whether you like Titanfall or not."