Review – Team Fortress 2

The original Team Fortress was released in 1996 as a Quake mod. The sequel, Team Fortress 2, has been in the making since 1998, and in that long period has made the giant leap from being another realistic-looking Quake mod to a Source-powered title with the visual style more reminiscent of a Pixar movie or J.C. Leyendecker drawing. So, with nine years of work under its belt, Team Fortress 2 has almost as much hype to live up to as Duke Nukem Forever, and as sure as you can always bet on Duke, you can bet that Team Fortress 2 does not disappoint.

Team Fortress 2 is, more than anything, a class-based, online first-person shooter. Rather than collecting your weapons on the fly, you choose a class to play as, each with their own unique weapons and abilities. In the original Team Fortress, these classes were dull, emotionless models with no real distinction other than the weapon in their hands. Team Fortress 2, on the other hand, takes each class and makes it its own character, with a unique personality fleshed out through the in-game voice commands and hilarious “Meet the…” vignettes available on the game’s official website. This helps to build an extended relationship to the classes, and everyone will quickly find a playing style to suit them; Are you the grenade-firing Demoman, or the sentry-sapping Spy?

No matter which class you favour the most; there is never a sense of unbalance among them. As the name implies, your success in battle depends hugely on teamwork. A clever Spy may be able to infiltrate a poorly-defended enemy base, but with proper communication and a round from the Pyro’s flamethrower, that Spy will be walking to his own demise. This element is constantly in play, across all of the game’s match types. A Scout may be able to run past a human enemy en route to the intelligence (much like your typical flag in capture-the-flag games), but he will need assistance from say, a Soldier, to dispose of hostile turrets. It is during these confrontations that the previously mentioned balance makes itself known; good teamwork can make the difference between victory and defeat in the heat of battle, even if you have to settle for a stalemate (you’re all losers!)

There are several maps available in Team Fortress 2, with each one revolving around a central playing point, which is either “capture the intelligence” or “capture the bases”. The number of maps is limited to six (on the PC you can obviously play on user-created maps too,) but you’ll never play two rounds the same. There are multiple ways to attack the objective, and with up to 32 players playing simultaneously (16 on consoles) and a total of nine classes to choose from, every match holds a new anecdote to bore your friends with. Tales of how you “rolled an uber in the base and told the engineer to cry some more” will flow through forums and instant-messengers for years to come.

Counter-Strike, as the original Half-Life mod, was made available in 1999 and is still being played today. Team Fortress 2 has all the boxes checked to ensure that, 8 years from now, we’ll all still be playing it as well. Yes, Team Fortress 2 is a class-based, online FPS, but it#s also so much more: It’s the kind of game you could play all night without getting bored, and even when you do, there are eight other classes available. Indeed, you could very well choose to play as a single class only, understanding their strengths and weaknesses and playing to their individual advantages, spectating another player’s movements to add to your deadly repertoire and opening up a one-man-army can of whoopass, but you could also be everybody’s best friend, providing cover-fire and assistance to the heavy-hitters on your side and making sure that the team scores a victory rather than worrying about your place in the rankings. I just described a typical run as the Spy and Medic, respectively, by the way.

It’s difficult to talk about Team Fortress 2 without going on a meaningless tangent about each and every class (and your own success as them) because the game is just so much fun to play that it develops an urge in the player to describe in detail the innermost workings of every glorious win and crushing loss. To put it simply, Team Fortress 2 is outstanding. Considering that The Orange Box also contains the Half-Life 2 games and Portal, you’d have to seriously dislike videogames to not go out and buy it. It’s just that damn good.