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(Now, I have reviewed this game previously, however I spent most of my time explaining the classes than anything, so I split the two posts. The review has new content, too.)
Team fortress 2 has been free on steam for a while now. A few guys I knew through Age of Empires played the game, and I never really had enough motivation (or money) to buy the game, but upon finding out it was free to play I decided to give it a go, after all, I needed a game to take up my time until Age of Empires Online, right? Probably the best decision I’ve ever made.
Team Fortress 2 is a fun and addicting multiplayer game. I don’t know who said it, but it was described as “The most fun you’ll have online.” And they’re damn right. Now, I’m no nooby f2p player, I’ve put in about 150 hours already and have upgraded to premium with a liberty launcher.
Since the game is free to play, you’d expect the premium players to have a massive advantage over free players. You’re wrong. What makes it so good is the weapon balance. Premium players can get weapons easier, through crafting, trading and more frequent weapon drops. Every weapon you find has some advantage or disadvantage, and brings different strategy. As soldier, the direct hit fires faster rockets that do more damage, but have a smaller blast radius, so you have to hit enemies dead on. A scout example is the Force-a-Nature (FaN), which fires faster and knocks back nearby enemies then the default scattergun, but does less damage and has a smaller clip. So while it’s fun knocking people around, you have to pump more lead into people and reload all the time. The balance is pretty decent, and means premium players who have more weapons are still on relatively even ground. Even weapons without a shown disadvantage (the game tells you) still take away from you, by being unable to use a pre-existing weapon in that slot, like removing the shotgun for the Buff Banner (as soldier), and leaving you with only the slow-reloading rocket launcher and your melee weapon.
Which brings me to the health system. Your health doesn’t regenerate, unless you’re a medic. You also have heaps of health, not like other games (ie CoD) where it’s a few shots to kill you. The heavy actually takes ages to bring down as all classes except spy and sniper (a backstab and fully charged headshot is an instant kill for all classes).
There is also a decent amount of strategy in this game. Every class has several different strategies and different weapons also bring different strategies to the game. As an example, the pyro’s main three strategies are holding down w and mouse 1, ambushing people with the flamethrower and running away, and abusing the airblast and knocking people around. With the Backburner, a different flamethrower, a good strategy is to act like a spy, ambushing people from behind because it gives the enemy critical hits from behind. Then there’s the Degreaser (flamethrower) and the Axetinguisher (melee weapon), in which you light people on fire then quickly swap to the axetinguisher to deal out some critical hits. I haven’t even gotten into the flare gun yet. And the you have the different map strategies, team strategies. Man, the possibilities go on and on. You really have to work as a team in all game modes, and the emphasis is more on helping teammates (or assists) rather than getting kills.
The game isn’t entirely serious either. Valve’s quirky sense of humor best explained by the portal games show up throughout, with the characters really showing their… Well, character throughout the game. Some of the sniper’s lines are pretty funny. And then you have taunts, which change depending on your current weapon that show up on your enemy’s killcam (a still of the person who just killed you), or to spam during the setup period. Some taunts also one hit kill people, making for hilarious kills while sitting around the corner waiting for some oblivious player to walk around at just the right time. And when you lose a game, the game goes into humiliation, where the losing team no longer can use weapons and have to avoid the charging winning team. I’ve had a few funny taunt kills as the losing team in humiliation as well.
Team Fortress 2 is… Just wow. It’s hard to find the correct words to explain it. And the community support is amazing, with community made maps popping up everywhere. I can hardly fault the game, in fact I can’t at all.
My Rating
Music: 10 (Rocket jump waltz… Says it all)
Gameplay: 10
Creativity: 10
Graphics: 10 (Cartoony but it really works for the game)
Other: 9.5
Total: 49.5/50
Wait, What? 