Team Fortress 2 Review

By Tom Francis for PC Gamer Magazine

Last night I had a really weird dream. I dreamt that Valve were finally going to bring out Team Fortress 2, only they'd made it look like some crazy Pixar cartoon, it was budget-priced, and all the classes talked as you played. And I was naked.

But here we are. This is the trouble with a dream job: you have to do it even when you're asleep. I'm just going to review this ridiculous 'Team Fortress 2' fantasy until I finally wake up and discover that I am, after all, a chartered accountant.

Let's not dwell too much on the original mod for Quake and Half-Life - that was ten years ago, not everyone played it, and TF2 is very obviously aimed at new players as much as old. Worth mentioning, quickly, is that it's got the same nine classes (pictured above) but fewer weapons for each, grenades have been removed entirely (thank God) and, well... look at it. Look what they did to it.

The changes might sound like simplification, but like the art style it's more about exaggeration. The Spy used to have a double-barrelled shotgun, for goodness' sake. Taking stuff like that out hasn't made it a simpler game, it's made the choice to be a Spy a more meaningful one.

Every class is so tightly focused on doing its thing that TF2 feels like nine different games fighting each other. That's bewildering at first, but it's a joy to watch characters this beautiful smash each other to pieces while you learn.

That Pixar comparison isn't fair. TF2's gurning murderers look better. Valve have remodelled their class-based multiplayer FPS after the work of turn-of-the-last-century illustrator JC Leyendecker. Google Image him and you'll see the similarities in the angular, characterful silhouettes. They're a world away from the lumpy sacks that were The Incredibles, and as it turns out, class-based multiplayer combat has long needed that distinctiveness.

It sounds like a small thing, to be able to tell what class someone is as surely and as clearly as you can see them at all. To have an immediate sense of the heft and power of a Heavy, rather than an abstract notion of his hit points.

But stuff like this has an intensifying effect on your moment-to-moment experience: you feel, see and comprehend the game world in Technicolor. It makes all the relationships instantly clear and the importance of your actions explicit. In short, it makes everything you do 300% cooler.

That's Team Fortress 2: multiplayer magnified. Co-operation means more, victory is sweeter, betrayal is more bitter, defeat more humiliating. But it's what lies at the heart of multiplayer gaming that matters most, and that is, in the parlance of our times, the lols.

The image of a Scout circle-strafing a Heavy quickly enough to smack him into a stupor with a tiny baseball bat is inherently funny. But it only really gets a belly-laugh when the Scout is a scampering stick-boy in knee-high socks, and his victim a meat-headed brickheap of a man. Character is a catalyst for comedy, and until now multiplayer games just haven't had it. They were already funny, but TF2 just brings it out beautifully, every round.

All that stuff - gloating, humiliation, snuff slapstick - is best with friends. But another of TF2's charms is that you form relationships with the people you're playing with so quickly. They might not be friendships exactly, but they add an edge of human interest to every interaction.

I don't know Gabe Newell very well, but after he'd followed me around as my personal Medic for a while, I felt like I did. The same goes for Robin Walker after he and I - as Engineers - constructed an elaborate ecosystem of killing machines that reaped dozens of enemy lives.