The complete guide to Team Fortress 2

Posted at: Tuesday 9th October 2007 by Josh Blodwell

Team Fortress 2 is Valve's latest FPS and it's set to be just as fiercly competetive as Counter Strike. Don't go into the game unarmed - check out our full guide to TF2's gameplay and character classes, courtesy of Josh Blodwell

Sudden Death

At the end of an unsuccessful round - where no team has won outright – TF2 enters Sudden Death mode. As the name implies, there’s no respawning, no health pickups and the lockers in the resupply rooms will not resupply you.

At the start of the round you may change class, while you remain in the resupply room, so it makes sense to choose a robust class. A heavy, soldier, or medic are strong survivor classes for the task.

While your chance of getting kills, or capturing Control Points is higher as a fighting class, Engineers are extremely useful in Sudden Death. As long as the Engineer constructs structures away from the front line, preferably choosing to hold a rear Control Point, surviving isn’t too hard, and if you play the role of repairman, and stay wary of spies, you can create an invaluable safe haven for players. There’s only one important thing to remember as an engineer in Sudden Death – build a dispenser first. If you forget, finding metal to build structures, or to upgrade and repair your sentry can be highly problematic.

Item Pickups

Ammo

Ammo Containers hold (wait for it...) ammunition, rather unsurprisingly, but they also have metal in them, which engineers need to build structures. They come in three different sizes. Small boxes contain a couple of clips and a little metal, the mid sized packs contain enough to replenish around half your ammo and half your metal, while large crates contain enough booty to fully restock you. Dropped weapons will also yield ammo and metal. It doesn’t matter what the weapon on the ground is. Run over it and refuel. Engineers can also collect metal by running over the debris from a destroyed structure.

First Aid

First Aid pickups are scattered around the map, and come in various sizes. How effective they are varies according to the class of character you’re playing, but the general rule of thumb is that the small box restores a quarter of your health bar, the mid-sized pack about half of it while the big hampers reward you with a full health bar. When there’s no medic, or they’re busy healing someone else, health kits can be the key to slowing an enemy rush or just staying alive a quarter of a second longer. If you’ve just come face-to-face with a Pyro and you’re heading towards a crispy death, a First Aid kit of any size will extinguish the flames allowing you time to find a medic or trudge to the nearest resupply room.

General gameplay mechanics

Critical Hits

Critical Hits enhance the effectiveness of aggressive players. Essentially, it’s a charged shot which delivers more damage than regular ammunition. You know when a shot has been fired as the action is accompanied by the sound of an electric bolt, and the projectile itself will be bathed in a plasma glow in the team’s colour. The effect is most visible on the Demoman’s sticky bombs, where they will sit bubbling. Should the demoman trigger that shot, and hit an enemy, he will see the words Critical Hit above the enemy’s head.