I’m glad I did too. Valve had this thing going where everyone was able to play the complete Team Fortress 2 online for the weekend (June 20th-22nd) because of the recent Pyro Update. They had done this before due to another update but I didn’t try it out because I didn’t have any money to buy it if I liked it anyways.
So anyways, on Thursday I decided to pre-load the game (Which is yet another wonderful feature from Steam) so that I could get to playing it as soon as the free time started. I began playing on Friday, I think I played for three hours straight :S and man was it one of the most confusing experiences I ever had. There was so much frickin things going on, people catching on fire, medics running around with some type of weird healing gun, heavies singing on their way to spray a horde of enemies, demo men shooting pipe bombs into tunnels and blowing up countless people, rockets from soldiers flying all over the place, sniper laser points crawling all over the walls, and skinny scouts running circles around the entire thing. Not to mention the interface seemed like it was giving me way more information than I could handle. One thing I liked right off the bat is a nice little ‘On the bright side…’ feature that shows up when you die. When you die, a little snippet says ‘On the bright side…’ and then a fact about you during that round, for example ‘you had 5 more kills than your previous best record’, or ‘you healed 3520 more than your previous round’, etc.
There’s a timer that counts down until the next re-spawn which actually isn’t annoying at all compared to other games’ such as Counter Strike: Source or Enemy Territory. By annoying I don’t mean I absolutely hate it, but it’s messed up when you’re all pumped, die, and are forced to wait 20 seconds or sometimes longer in CS:S’ case to respawn. In TF2, it’s actually fun spectating people. The only feeling I get is anxiety when I’m waiting, wishing I could respawn quicker to go heal my teamates who are getting uber rushed.
I’m still really new and reading many guides on TF2 (Seeing how I’m months late to the party, like 8 months I think, it came out last November, or was it October??). One thing I really liked about TF2 is how Valve is committed to continue working on it, and they keep releasing new maps and updates (New weapons, achievements, etc.). They just recently set up a blog detailing what they’re up to. They also keep releasing new ‘Meet the blah’ videos where they make short animated films which I think are Pixar quality, introducing the different classes, the latest one being Meet the Sniper. They just add more atmosphere to the game. The game manual just adds to it. It’s not even really a game manual it’s just a pretend manual for the engineer’s sentry. So in terms of longevity I think these were $20 well spent seeing how it seems Valve is going to continue supporting TF2 (As opposed to UT3, a game which I really love but is failing due to Epic messing up bad. They haven’t released the new 1.3 update in months and the beta changelog for it had very few notable fixes.).
The graphics are amazingly well, they just feel right. At first I was skeptical, I did like the graphics from the very beginning (I like the Incredibles look) but I wondered how it would feel when you were actually playing the game. Now that I have, I don’t think it would’ve worked any other way, it just feels perfect. One thing that kinda sucks is that it doesn’t have the Worldish Source Engine Physics. Well, let me clarify. It’s a game built using the Source Engine so of course it uses its physics part I’m sure of that, but what I mean is you can’t shoot barrels and expect them to go rolling, etc. etc. This gives for a very static feel which I’m not used to (I’m spoiled from Counter Strike: Source), but I’m assuming it’s so that the processing power could go towards the other fun aspects of the game, though adding those physics would definitely add a new level of interactiveness to the game.
The user interface is very neatly streamlined. It’s very intuitive and helpful, and I really like the style. I’m usually not for the ‘big clonky interfaces’ but it really fits this game’s style (Where the engineers look like bob the builder) so I really like it. The sound in the game is awesome, the music is great too, it’s really fitting and adds to the humor/excitement. The voice acting is awesome. The soldier for example sounds all deep and dumb, the sniper sounds Australian, the scout sounds like a typical American punk kid, I haven’t heard the soldier talk yet, the medic sounds German, the Demoman sounds African-American, and the Pyro’s sound the funniest I think. Their voices are muffled by their breathing masks so they sound funny when they say Thanks! or yell MEDIC! The announcer lady is really funny too, for example if the enemy takes a control point, she sounds all pissed off, and if we have taken a control point, earning us additional time in the game, she sounds all sensual.
I haven’t played everything yet I think and I still don’t have the names of all the maps memorized yet. So far I know there’s three game types: control point, capture the flag/intelligence, and payload which was recently introduced into the game in April 2008. Control point has different variants, but the main gist is that there are different control points on the map and either team has to capture them all. One variation for example is that one team already has them all and must defend them from the other team. Capturing control points is as easy as standing on top of a control point, the more people on it the faster it gets captured, of course, this is only easy if you don’t have to worry about pyros, demos, soldiers, snipers, heavies, and sentries to spam at you; good luck with that. The other game type is capture the flag. There isn’t a flag but instead there’s a briefcase, and it’s the same as with any other capture the flag game, except the briefcase leaves a trail of papers that disappears after a few seconds, and everyone gets a compass pointing to each team’s intelligence. If someone takes your intelligence, you have to kill them for them to drop it. You can’t run it back to your base, instead you must wait a full minute. The final game type is payload which I think is really fun. There’s a track that goes from one point of the map to another, and one team must stand next to a mine cart to make it move along the track and eventually get to the other point.
One cool aspect of the game is the fact that there are, well, I guess you can call them ‘fortresses’ but they don’t look like them. They’re basically where you spawn, and only you can go in there, enemies can’t go in. There, you can find cabinets full of ammo, health, and metal for engineers to build/upgrade sentries, teleporters, and dispensers (Which act like mini cabinets). A cool thing is that usually in each map there’s an attacking team and a defending team. The attacking team has to wait in their spawn area until the warmup timer is over. The warmup time allows everyone to get ready: medics to charge their uber, engineers to build teleporters/sentries/dispensers, etc. The attacking team has to wait behind a fenced gate that opens once the time is up, and usually the defending team runs up to it and both teams just taunt each other (There are taunt animations for every class) and some people hit the fence with bats to taunt even more (Obviously you can see through the gate). This is just another little thing which adds even more flavor to this awesome game.
The game has a voice menu as in Enemy Territory and Counter Strike: Source, with it you can yell for a medic, etc. At first I wasn’t going to install my very own TF2: No Blood patch, all the characters exploding into blood just adds to the chaos which is kind of confusing at times. Installing the patch (Which, just updated yesterday to version 1.3, now includes Funny Gibs) makes the game feel more natural if you ask me. The models now explode into tons of little models of like springs, cogs, rubber duckies, etc. You might be like wtf but having a game with the Incredibles graphics, with engineers that look like bob the builder, etc., having those guys gushing out into blood seems more like a wtf to me. I’ll leave the blood to CS:S where it at least feels like it’s part of the game.
photo credit: Bryan Sutter
Anyways, looking forward to having fun with TF2, I’ve already been having lots of fun with it. I’ve become a pretty decent medic (Climbing up to the very top of the list very quickly), the medic gets points whenever someone he’s healing gets points. While a medic heals, their ubercharge meter fills. Once it’s full, one can alt-fire and it will make them and whoever they’re healing invulnerable until the ubercharge meter depletes. I suck at the other classes other than Engineer and Sniper.
This is the second game I’ve bought this year, after UT3, and I definitely think it’s worth it considering I think it’s going to be the only game I’m going to play at all (Haven’t been playing many games lately). Let me know if you have it and/or are thinking about getting it, I’m so stupid for not having gotten it before, oh well, at least now I have it. I should’ve listened to all you guys in the comments of the TF2: No Blood and gotten it earlier. As always, buying a game on Steam is the easiest of all. The transaction was seamless and I was done in under 30 seconds. Best of all, I already had the game, I didn’t have to re-download or anything because the free trial period included the entire game, not some modified version. 
