Last weekend was Titanfall 2’s biggest in terms of peak player counts, and it was all thanks to Respawn giving people a whole weekend to try Titanfall 2 for free. Steamcharts reports more people were playing Titanfall 2 than when the game first arrived last summer, helping to bring about a sort of Titanfall renaissance five years after the game’s initial release.
Titanfall’s newfound popularity has also helped convince speedrunners to dust off their jump kits and give Titanfall 2’s Gauntlet another, resulting in several broken world records.
In case you still haven’t played Titanfall 2 (and at this point, you really have no excuse), the Gauntlet serves as a test of a player’s skill at the end of the game’s initial tutorial. It’s a timed obstacle course where the player must use Titanfall 2’s movement mechanics to make it to the finish line as quickly as possible after killing 15 enemies.
For the past two years, the world record holder was Cash Mayo with a time of 11.7 seconds. You can see that run on YouTube here. Carefully placed grenades help propel the player forward far faster than their legs or even jump kit ever could, and then it’s just a matter of precise aim and timing to rocket through the course in under 12 seconds.
That record stood until April 22 when WhateverShoe shaved a full half-second off of Cash Mayo’s time, but then Cash fired back just last weekend with a new record of 11.1 seconds.
Believe it or not, it’s technically possible to do the gauntlet even faster. Because Titanfall 2’s movement mechanics conserve momentum, the player can repeat the gauntlet over and over, building speed on each run. At that velocity, it’s impossible for a normal human to aim at the enemies in the split second before they zoom by, so machine assistance is basically a requirement.
If you’ve got an Xbox Series X, you can even enjoy Titanfall 2 at 120 FPS, which is the best way to see yourself blast through the Gauntlet.
