Team Fortress 2 Review

A couple of days ago, I finally got my Steam account sorted out again. Dusted off the ole' username and password and fired up Valve's newest multiplayer sensation - the long overdue and long awaited Team Fortress 2.

Now for those of you not in the know, Vader has written up a very nice preview, which you can check out here.
For my part, I was lucky enough to actually get into some serious fragging action with this puppy.

Now as you know, this is a class based multiplayer shooter. This has been Team Fortress' hook since its conception, many moons ago. Valve being a smart development company that they are, realized as years passed and production was stretched, that they wouldn't get anywhere with yet another generic take on class-based multiplayer combat.

So what they did was make what I think is the classiest class-based multiplayer shooter of the lot. Even if this pun seems rather tacky, it actually quite accurately describes the Team Fortress 2 experience from several different angles.

TF2 is the classiest class-based shooter around for beautifully incorporating the lovable art style of games like No One Lives Forever and Evil Genius into a multiplayer shooter environment. The Source engine is great at creating what is certainly the liveliest and most colorful scenery for all-out carnage we've seen in a while.

But there's so much more to TF2's classiness in that sense than just the visuals. The entire experience is tweaked with amazing attention to detail in mind. The soundtrack is superb and the voice overs are witty and incredibly complimentary to the art.
The classiness extends beyond what we see and hear, as numerous wonderful gameplay details make the matches more interesting.
For example, if you keep getting killed by the same guy, he'll be labeled as your Nemesis. Getting him in the next round will be followed by an audio and visual cue, letting you know that you've gotten your revenge.

Another awesome detail that I caught by accident (and is shown in the first screenshot), is like a little comic bubble that points to a part of your dismembered body. So if you are taking a screenshot and your arm, leg or head happens to be in the shot (awesome, I know), you'll get a little pointer saying - A bit of you! It's little touches like this that put a smile on my face.

TF2 is also the classiest class-based shooter for actually putting more emphasis on classes and their distinctive features than any other shooter on the market. It almost felt like playing Arenas in World of Warcraft at times.

I've tested out as many classes as I could. Hell, I played with all of them, but stuck to some more than others. The thing is, the longer you play, the more you start seeing the differences in strategies; just different gameplay styles that you have to employ with each class.

Playing as the Doc, a pure support class, you truly have to have a totally different mindset than when playing an offensive class like the Soldier or the Scout. As Doc, you need to identify the best offensive classes on your side and sort of always look sideways and over your shoulder as you heal, making sure that you are, ideally, out of line of fire, while the offensive class is showering the opposition with bullets.

The most common strategy, of course, is to find a "Heavy," a huge bulky bald dude with a chain gun. These fuckers have 300 health points, move really slowly, and even slower once the chain gun starts spinning. On the bright side, however, gluing a healer to a tank means that with right support this combo can become unstoppable in some situations.

Then again, having a few well-placed Snipers and a Scout or a Spy to go after the doc (while the snipers pick off the slow moving "Heavy") will create quite a bit of problems for the Heavy-Doc pair. A counter to that would be another Doc healing the Doc that's healing the Heavy - well - you get the picture. Having such excellently "carved out" class profiles entails a multitude of tactics. This clearly shows that beneath its cartoon-ish and off-beat exterior, Team Fortress 2 is one serious multiplayer shooter.

I won't even get into how different and rewarding (if mastered) it can be playing as the Spy. Spies can become invisible and disguise themselves as enemy units; they have a great number of options at their disposal, and yet, because it feels so different to play one, mastering the gameplay will take you a while.

Finally, the Engineer and Demo classes are defensive powerhouses. Bearing in mind that most of the maps that I've played in TF2 are either a variation of the Conquer mode, or Capture the Flag (capture the intelligence as it were), their role in the game can be vital if played properly. The Engineer sentry guns and Demo's proximity mines can truly keep the opposition at bay.

Having played the game for hours now, all that I can safely say is that I feel like I've only scratched the surface in terms of tactics. You simply have to have several lengthy play sessions with people who are prepared to work together to understand why. You'll see the potential, but you won't necessarily master the tactics.

In the end, I spent a lot of time playing as the Soldier. Being an old-school Quake fanatic, I simply loved the Soldier's rocket launcher. The physics felt so much like Quake 2, that I felt right at home. The speed of the rockets, the aiming and the splash damage felt a lot like Quake 2.

But then, looking at what other guys are doing, I couldn't tell that one class was heavily favored over the rest. At this stage, the classes in Team Fortress 2 felt balanced. Amazing when you think about how many unique features there are to each one.

Performance-wise, the Source engine ran like a dream on my rig - Core2Duo, 2GB RAM, 8800 GTS - and the net code was excellent. At 50-160 pings (depending on whether the server was European or US) the gameplay felt exactly the same. The movement of other characters onscreen never felt jerky, nor did they teleport around like they are known to do (even at low latency) when the net code is clunky.

Stay tuned for our full review as I "sacrifice" for you guys and "work hard," on getting enough hours into this game to write it up. I am prepared to do that for you. That's how selfless I am.