The classic mod for Quake and Half-Life makes its long-awaited return in style.
[Editor's Note: This is one of three separate GameSpy.com reviews for titles included in The Orange Box package, as PC versions are being sold separately via Valve's Steam digital download service. For more, see our reviews of Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and the entire The Orange Box package.]
Not since the 2002 release of Battlefield 1942 has a multiplayer game stormed the GameSpy offices like Team Fortress 2. Maybe it's the new cartoon-like art style, or the tight maps that keep the action humming along, or maybe it's just been too long since we've had a proper successor to Team Fortress Classic. Whatever the case, Team Fortress 2 has a near-perfect blend of fast action combined with depth and variety that will keep it in heavy rotation around here for a long time to come.
Class Action
In every way, the unequivocal stars of Team Fortress 2 are its nine character classes. There's something for every play style, from the straightforward soldier to the speedy scout to the sneaky spy. While specific strategies vary from map to map, there are certain constants to each. If you're a medic, you hook up with a heavy weapons guy or soldier for maximum impact. If you're an engineer, find key choke points and protect them with turrets. If you're a sniper, well, just know that we hate you.
Each of these classes carries a primary weapon, has a few basic abilities and varies from one to the next in terms of health and running speeds. As a result, every fight you get into is different from the next: a soldier needs to approach fighting a pyro much differently than a grenade-chucking demoman or heavy weapons guy. With nine classes and rarely more than twelve players on a team (the current supported player limit is 24, although a handful of servers have bumped that up to 32), it means almost every skirmish you get into is unique, and keeps the action fresh from one game to the next.
Team Fortress 2 ships with six maps, which may not seem like many, but a number of gameplay styles keep things interesting. A remake of the TF classic "2Fort" is the only capture the flag map in the bunch, but it's already become the office favorite. "Granary" and "Well" feature five control points in a chain, as teams push back and forth trying to reach the other's endpoint. "Dustbowl" and "Gravel Pit" both alternate placing teams in offensive and defensive roles in an assault-type format, and "Hydro" has teams fighting over two points at a time in an attempt to reach the other's base.
What all the maps have in common are relatively small sizes and tight layouts that ensure that the action is rarely far away. Each has multiple routes from one point to the other so that there's rarely one solitary choke point for both teams to clog up; attackers generally look for the weakest link in the chain, while defenders need to remain aware of their surroundings and go where they're needed. Long-gone are the days of Quake CTF where you could grab a ton of rockets and spam anyone going for your team's flag; whatever the game type, every game of TF2 becomes an ever-changing experience. In fact, if there's any knock on Team Fortress 2, it's that respawn times can often take twenty seconds or longer, which feels like an eternity when the enemy is running off with your flag or assaulting a control point.
In fact, it seems there's no shortage of great moments that fill up every TF2 match. The medic has the ability to charge up an invulnerability power that lasts ten seconds for him and whomever he's healing, which becomes a stalemate-busting ten seconds of panic for the other team. We've taken to playing spy when games culminate in a sudden death last-man-standing round, and there's nothing like getting behind enemy lines and stabbing four or five enemies before anyone notices you. The combination of classes and maps make for endless strategies to test, and it's always satisfying when you stumble across something that can break through the enemy lines -- or keep them at bay.
As is obvious from the screenshots, TF2 uses a cartoonish art style -- sensationally realized -- that's radically different than Valve's previous games. Each character has its own distinctive shape and animations that make them distinguishable from a distance, and bright shiny colors are used at every corner. The style extends beyond the art, however: everything from the game's music to the camera zoom that shows you who killed you conveys a lighthearted tone that keep things from ever feeling too serious.
Like the rest of the Orange Box package, we encountered zero technical difficulty in getting Team Fortress 2 running smoothly, even at resolutions up to 1920x1200. At a recent LAN party at GameSpy HQ, we had over 24 people playing TF2 on a variety of machines, and while a few older machines had to lower the details a bit, just about any machine that ran Half-Life 2 three years ago should be able to get TF2 running smoothly without much trouble. With all the bells and whistles turned on, TF2 is like a cartoon come to life -- if we could just find some way to turn off the player tags, we'd probably run out of hard drive space in a week from taking screenshots.
Although the core gameplay is still essentially the same as the Team Fortress mods we've played for Quake and Half-Life over the last decade, Team Fortress 2 feels like a completely fresh game. There's enough variety in the classes and maps to keep every game interesting from start to finish, and extras like lifetime records and stat tracking that are routinely fed to the player offer achievements to shoot for over the long haul. At this point, it's a leading contender for our Multiplayer Game of the Year, and whether you pick it up as part of the Orange Box package or on its own via the Steam digital download service, it's worth every penny.
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