Team Fortress 2 – First look

Posted at: 12:39pm 9th October 2007 by Phil Hartup

Phil Hartup puts the BETA of Valve’s new online multiplayer shooter through its paces

Three years after the release of Half-Life 2, the Source engine is back with Team Fortress 2, the big fat diamond in Valve’s new Orange Box package, which also contains Half-Life 2 Episodes One and Two, as well as Portals. This is quite a meaty gaming feast, but it’s Team Fortress 2 that we’re looking at today and there’s a hell of a lot to look at.

For those who don’t remember their gaming history, Team Fortress was the original team FPS based on the Quake engine, which was released back in 1996 as freeware. Team Fortress was the granddaddy of team games, introducing such staples to the genre as class selection, as well as introducing computer games to the ‘capture-the-flag’ style of gameplay. While a sequel has been touted since the turn of the century, it’s taken even longer than Half-Life 2 to develop, so it’s about time it showed up.

So what’s it all about then? Basically, you have a variety of team games; capture the flag, area domination, base attack and so forth. Then you have two teams of ideally equal numbers - the red team and the blue team, and you fight it out to win. It’s a multiplayer game at its most primitive; you just find a server and pile in.

Once you’re on a server and you’ve picked a team, you’re then confronted with the selection of characters. There are nine distinctly different classes in all, and each is split into three categories: assault, defence and support. In the attack category you’ll find the Scout; fast moving and ideal for capturing objectives. Meanwhile, the Soldier packs a lot of hit points, a rocket launcher and shotgun, making him an ideal character to lead an attack. Finally, the Pyro has a flamethrower, which is devastating when you’re attacking through corridors or other confined spaces.

In defence you have the Demoman, who is armed with a grenade launcher that can be used to lay remotely-detonated bombs, as well as impact or timed grenades. Here you’ll also find the Heavy Weapons Guy, who is a slow moving tank of a man toting a minigun that’s ideal for shredding attackers, or for pushing forward if you need a heavy attacker. Lastly there’s the Sniper, who does what basically every sniper in any game does, although the fast pace of the game and lack of perfect sniping chokepoints means that he is by no means as powerful as, for example, a well-played AWP user in Counter-Strike.

Finally, the support characters feature the Engineer, who can build turrets and a thing called a dispenser that supplies health and ammo to those who stand near it. Meanwhile, the Medic is able to heal nearby troops, as well as supercharge them so that they become invincible for as long as the medic is with them. The symbiosis between medics and the troops they heal means that being a doctor now is by no means a recipe for tedium sat behind the lines. Lastly there is the Spy, who has short term invisibility, as well as the ability to disguise himself as an enemy player. This is something that becomes very important on servers where you can damage your team mates; if there’s no friendly fire, then this ability is neutralised by the fact that you can just shoot everybody you see, friend or foe. The spy can also disable sentry guns and kill in one hit with his backstab ability. When a spy is disguised, he takes the name of an enemy player, so the usual way to spot a spy is if you see somebody running around with your name.