SINGAPORE — Piloting your own giant robot or mech is the dream of many — myself included — and with the upcoming Titanfall it looks like dreams do come true. Set to be released on March 11, Titanfall won’t be the first multiplayer shooter that allows you to pilot a mech, based on the beta we tried, it looks like Titanfall might stand heads and shoulders over the competition.

Unveiled at last year’s E3, Titanfall is an upcoming first-person shooter by the former developers of hit gaming franchise Call Of Duty. Set to be the first release of Respawn Entertainment, in Titanfall you play a pilot, caught in a war between the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation and the Militia. In most missions you start off on foot as you wait for your Titan to deploy. When the time comes, your Titan lands on the site you’ve picked out, and when you’re near enough, the Titan will pick you from wherever you are (yes, even if you’re in the air), and your heads-up display transforms into that of a mech.

The transition from pilot to mech is almost poetry in motion, but that moment of grace is short-lived as soon you’re embroiled in mech-on-mech action. The most fitting word to describe this is “epic”: The scale at which the battle takes place can be breathtaking especially since you were staring up at these metal behemoths just moments before.

There’s a variety of Titans available, and each can be further configured, from Titans that shoot homing missiles to those that explode when destroyed, hopefully taking the enemy with them. It feels different enough to support a variety of playing styles, and from shooting to exploding to punching an opponent — and yanking out the pilot — the metal on metal action is beautiful mayhem. Have a pesky pilot trying to take you down? Instead of shooting him, you can always just run over and stomp into to death.

But to focus on the mechs is to do the pilots injustice, after all, you start on foot for most of the modes and your skill as a pilot helps reduce the time you wait for your Titan to fall. Pilots in a damaged Titan can also choose to eject and flee on foot. While the weapons you have tend to be the generic shooter weapons, the thrill comes when you execute perfect wall runs and double jumps that allow you to breach distances, cross gaps and climb buildings like a free-runner and really gives the game a huge sense of scale. And you do start with a Smart Pistol — aim its reticule on a human-sized target long enough for it to triangulate and a single shot is enough to take it down.

Still, as a pilot sometimes you do have to face down Titans. That might sound like overwhelming odds, but you are armed with anti-Titan weapons that help ensure that you’re not instantly cannon fodder while on foot. While a well-placed blast from a Titan will take you out instantly, finding a good hiding place and staying mobile both can keep you alive long enough to deal a killing blow. Feeling brave? You can even clamber onto a Titan from behind and do a little hands-on demolition.

Some have compared Titanfall’s mech on mech action to both Hawken (still in early access) and MechWarrior Online, but to do so would be an injustice. In the realm of giant robot combat Titanfall — even in beta — feels leaps and bounds above the others, and that’s already without considering the pilot aspect of the game. Some have also taken to calling it Call Of Duty with mechs, but to do so is akin to saying a car is wheels with an engine. While Titanfall is a first-person shooter at its core, the verticality of the gameplay and the fluid gameplay makes it an experience that’s quite different from anything out there.

I’ve never been big on multiplayer shooters, never having the patience to be good enough, but Titanfall has me sufficiently excited to want to give it a go. While I’ve only tried the “classic” multiplayer mode, the game’s story mode is also said to blur the line between multiplayer combat and single-player campaigns. How they will balance that together with the over-arching story remains to be seen.

Sadly, as Microsoft is not launching the Xbox One till the end of this year, console gamers will have to play on the Xbox 360 version, which is being adapted by a third party, Bluepoint games, and it’s hard to say if the game will be a watered-down version. That said, it feels like people will still be playing this even after the Xbox One finally comes here, but as for me, I’ll be jumping into my PC cockpit right when it launches in about a week.