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Team Fortress 2
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 10th October 2007
Class Action!
So, there are nine classes and each of them has a different advantage and disadvantage. Some of these we’ve covered before in our beta preview, others we haven’t.Either way, the classes are largely what you’d expect them to be – Medics are a fairly weak supporting class, Scouts are very fast but lack offensive power and Soldiers are good all-rounders with no particular speciality.
There are however a few things which stand out as being noteworthy, like the Sniper’s rifle which has been adjusted slightly. Carrying the weapon around normally it’s inaccurate and underpowered, not even having its own crosshair. Zoom in though and the rifle can be a one-hit-kill weapon if used right.
That much is to be expected, but the gun is also altered so that it’s more balanced and fair. A laser pointer is added when zoomed in so that observant players can check the area and the rifle takes about three seconds to power up to its full Golden Gun potential.
The Medic too has his arsenal altered, no longer wielding a set of medpacks but a mysterious new healing gun and a low-powered nailgun for defence. The healing gun allows healing from a close-moderate distance and if used regularly can give both the Medic and its target a burst of invulnerability for a few moments.
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When I originally found out about the healing gun, I was crazy with despair and thought that this would be a game-breaking alteration. However, on closer inspection it really isn’t that bad. Partly because nobody ever plays as the Medic and partly because Medics are available to both teams.
Fighting fire with fire may not work in real life, but it’s always an option in Team Fortress 2.
One of the things which makes the classes in Team Fortress 2 so brilliant is that each of them has been cut-down and streamlined as much as possible. Each player has only three or four weapons, with the exception of the Spy who has a few disguises and the like to fiddle with. This reduction of the weapons helps to keep things at a fast pace and you won’t find yourself scrolling through a list of nine different types of identical rifle – you just get a ranged weapon, a melee weapon and then either a class-specific skill or another ranged weapon.
The Scout for instance, who is easily my favourite class, has a double-barrelled shotgun, a pistol and a baseball bat. One hit on the back of the head with the bat is enough to take down almost any player, while the two ranged weapons are more for laying down covering fire.
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The classes all have a radically different appearance to each other too. One of the problems in the older Team Fortress games was that the skins and models for the classes could be easily confused. That’s not so in Team Fortress 2 and the new cel-shaded look (well, technically it’s a custom built phong shader, but never mind) helps enormously.
Each class has a different set of animations for movement, a noticeably different silhouette and a swanky new uniform. No longer will you be firing shots at that soldier in the distance only to realise when he gets close that it’s actually a Pyro. The classes are also amazingly well balanced too. Balancing is a delicate process and something which many people take for granted, but it can take months and months to get the game just right and Valve’s effort clearly shows.
Making sure that a Scout moves at a fair speed and can’t close the distance on a Sniper too easily is something which can change the entire way the game plays and a lot of attention has clearly gone into making the game enjoyable no matter which class you play as – so long as you aren’t a namby-pamby Medic.
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