E3 2014: Titanfall's Marked For Death is VIP Mode MK2

Remember the VIP mode in old Counter-Strike? You know, the one where players without the faintest idea of what they were doing would be marked as a VIP and spend their time cluelessly bunny hopping straight into the path of enemy AK fire? Well, good news everyone! Titanfall's upcoming June title update is introducing Marked For Death mode, which bears an eerie resemblance to Counter Strike's now defunct VIP mode. Except, this time, it's a hell of a lot more fun.

The crux of the mode is that a member of each team is "marked for death," which basically places a massive "kill me now" sign over your head by highlighting your position on the map with a large red target sign. Whichever team kills the opposing team's marked for death member gets the points. The game marks players for death at random, which means that sooner or later, you're going to be hunted down, which is a scary proposition if you're new to the game.

That's not to say you need to be a super-pro at it either. I'm what you might call a "dabbler" in Titanfall, in that I'm not an everyday player, but I can certainly hold my own in a heated deathmatch. Playing Marked For Death on the recently released Wargames map, I was able to land plenty of marked kills with my stealthy Smart Pistol approach (drop your n00b jokes in the comments below), locking in lots of points for my team.

And you do need to work as a team to secure victory. While I was off hunting down the marked player, my teammates were guarding our target, fending off attacking Titans with suppressing fire. However, in another round, I had some less than helpful teammates, and when I was marked for death, help was nowhere to be found. In that situation, simply hightailing out of a busy area to somewhere more secluded helped, but with a big red target above my head, hiding didn't help for long.

One tactic I found useful was to save my titan for when I was marked, using its armoured protection to buy myself a few extra minutes of life while my comrades went out on the hunt. Marked For Death isn't a complicated mode, certainly less so than the VIP mode that inspired it, but it's that very simplicity that makes it so fun. There were no weapon limitations or escape zones to deal with. Like the rest of Titanfall it was just balls-to-the-wall action, with quick respawns and snappy shooting keeping the action flowing.

So yeah, I had a blast with Marked For Death. And it's part of Titanfall's upcoming June Title Update, which introduces titan customisation. You can select from two new titan voices named Lisa and Jeeves, as well chuck some new decals onto your titan. There are new burn cards for your titan too, which gives it boosts like amped weapons and enhanced abilities. Best of all, the June Title Update is free to all existing owners of Titanfall, so long as you're playing on Xbox One or PC. Xbox 360 owners will have to wait a little longer to get in on the action.

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