Team Fortress 2

"Who cares about realism when you've got Team Fortress 2?"

In 1999, Valve Corporation released Team Fortress Classic, a class-based shooter that quickly became very popular among the online gaming community. It was a fun, easy-to-pick-up game that gave you nine classes to choose from, ranging from the quick, nail-gun wielding Scout to the slow but powerful man that was the Heavy. Eventually, Valve started brainstorming ideas for a new Team Fortress, and the development of this new instalment was to be trapped in development hell for seven to nine years. But then finally, Valve released their final product in The Orange Box, alongside the critically acclaimed Half-Life 2 series and one of their latest masterpieces Portal. Team Fortress 2 had arrived at last.

As I sat down to play this new Team Fortress, I was taken aback by just how much it had changed. Where were the gritty men that were the Demomen and the Soldiers? What was with the Scout's brand new look and the Spy's spotless pinstripe suit? They all seemed so…funky. But…I just couldn't help liking them. For years I had been playing many online shooters that came down to grizzled men in dark outfits using a Desert Eagle or random assault rifle to have a brief firefight with their opponent. But watching the newly realised Soldier, with his helmet over his eyes, jumping around, blowing his opponents to pieces with a well-aimed rocket and yelling “MAGGOTS!” at the top of his voice was just really, really refreshing. It was funny, something that is extremely uncommon in online shooters, it was silly and it wasn't taking itself seriously one bit. And that is a great deal more attractive to someone who's never tried an online shooter before. If the art style had been the same as before, it would be nowhere near as fun as it was now.

With Team Fortress 2, you have a game on your hands that doesn't at all strive to be ultra-realistic like so many others do. It realises that fun doesn't equate to realism. The caricaturised classes are so wildly silly, so ridiculously different from everything else you've seen, you immediately take a liking to them. And as for the settings, why, asks the game to itself, should everything be in a bland, generic compound-slash-factory where everything is dark and the rooms are all samey? Everything in Team Fortress 2 is set in desert surroundings with all the buildings built by some mad scientist, and deep in the bases of both teams are giant nuclear weapons, maps pinpointing to where the organization should strike next and rows of computers in front of a massive radar. It's like something out of a 70's comedy film, as if everything was created by an evil genius who plots to destroy the entire world. It's all complete nonsense yet it's absolutely brilliant. So keep your ultra-realism to yourself thanks, I'll be here having a riot in these utterly crazy maps.

For the gameplay itself, what Valve manages to achieve is not just one type of gameplay. It encompasses nine, totally different ways to play Team Fortress 2, and that comes from the nine radically different classes, all with their own unique abilities, and it's guaranteed that any type of player on any online shooter will find just the character for them. Do you normally fancy hanging back in the map and picking off your enemies from a distance? The Sniper is there for you, complete with his powerful sniper rifle that could kill a player instantly with a well-aimed shot. What about heading in there, gun swinging wildly, ploughing down everything in sight? The Heavy it is, with a staggering amount of health and a minigun that can kill a player in seconds. Do you sometimes wish you could avoid fighting and support the team in other ways? Try the Engineer, constructing defensive sentry guns that tears through any person unlucky enough to get caught in its sights, or the Medic who keeps everyone topped up on health and can even make people invincible for about ten seconds, which can be crucial to the result of a round.

Something else that makes Team Fortress 2 so much better than most online shooters is its emphasis on teamwork. If you're buying this game for an experience where you can sprint in headfirst and not give a care for the rest of the team, then you're obviously unable to read game titles. For years, online shooters have had team-based games in which everyone runs around and does their own thing, instead of co-operating. In TF2 you will see Medics running around healing their teammates, Engineers building Dispensers to supply people with health and ammo, everybody pushing together to grab that last control point in the enemy base. This is just the sort of thing that so many game developers fail to incorporate in their games, so that everyone ends up running about and shooting randomly in vain attempts of getting kills. In TF2, if you're not a team worker, then you won't last long.

To further cement the whole team feeling of the game, the two teams themselves are RED and BLU, Reliable Excavation Demolition and the Builders League United respectively. Sounds pretty basic, red vs. blue, but what's nice about this is that the teams of both sides have a certain building style so you know just where you are. RED's buildings have a warmer sort of build, made out of wood and using temperate colours, whereas BLU's are made of scrap iron and other metal, with chilly colours and mismatched soldering. It's a great little feature that along with your team around you, immediately tells you just who you should be aiming at.

Team Fortress 2 also brings along a range of game modes that can be enjoyed by everyone. Like the classes, there's something for everyone. In Control Point, your team must capture all five Control Points on the map by capturing them sequentially. Sometimes RED might be entirely on Defence while BLU is always on Offence, and RED has to hold out until the end of the round. For Capture the Flag, each team has an Intelligence briefcase, which they must defend, but at the same time capture the other team's Intel and bring it back to their base. In Payload, a BLU cart is filled to the brim with explosives and BLU has to push it through three sectors of the map while RED attempts to defend their base. And Arena is a fight to the death, where each team has to completely eliminate the other. As simple as they all sound, there's a certain attractiveness that brings you back to it to play again and again, trying out new classes, new tactics, or just for plain simple fun.

The sound in Team Fortress 2 is absolutely top-notch. Each class has a distinct personality with different voice actors for each one. For instance, the Scout is an arrogant baseball player from Boston and the Demoman is a drunken, black, one-eyed Scotsman. They'll often shout things in the heat of battle, sometimes to taunt their opponent, to cheer, to give commands, it doesn't matter, you'll find it impossible to hate them. The sound effects are brilliant too, from the sound of the Spy's butterfly knife entering his victim's back, to the sound of your body exploding into giblets of meat. Everything seems to fit perfectly; nothing at all seems out of place.

Perhaps the best thing about Team Fortress 2 is Valve's keenness of keeping people happy. I've found many companies in the past to be apathetic towards their customers' enjoyment and will rarely make even a patch. Valve not only makes patches consistently, it's always producing new maps, achievements for classes, listening to the general opinion of things and fixing them so that the game doesn't feel buggy or like it's missing anything. Perhaps if more companies were like Valve, we would have a much better library of games.

Overall, Team Fortress 2 is a gleaming gem in a sea of staleness. It's a message to all the developers so obsessed with realistic design and weapons, and it says to them: "You're forgetting about the FUN!". And with Valve's excellent record of updates, you can always expect something new around the corner. So what are you waiting for? It's only 20 US dollars, go out, get it, and prepare to be blown away!

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 08/25/08

Game Release: Team Fortress 2 (EU, 04/11/08)