Team Fortress 2 Review

9.4

Format PC

Developer Valve

Publisher Sierra

Genre First Person Shooter

8 Comments

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.

That's a quirk of the way friendly classes tessellate, but TF2 is more interested in playing up your relationship with players on the enemy team. Each time you die the game freeze-frames on your killer after a short delay, and that delay is calculated very cynically to catch him in the middle of an offensive taunt animation. Worse, the game then invites you to save this lewd image of your murderer for posterity. And the game looks so damnably good that you're usually compelled to do it.

Valve know we like to mock the dead, dance on graves, hump corpses. So as well as making that mockery more crushing, they've also made a game of it: taunting now roots you to the spot, pulls you out into third-person view to watch yourself swagger, leaving you utterly helpless.

You've actually got to make a strategic decision about whether you've got a few seconds to play air guitar on your victim's carcass or not. I've seen chain-reactions of death where a Sniper waves to his unfortunate victim, is shot dead mid-mock by another, who then performs the same taunt - with the same fatal result.

The taunts, and the lines uttered alongside them, are part of the persona Valve have given each class. If you've seen the Meet The Heavy or Soldier trailers, you've had a taste of this.

But the idea that your character is a character, with his own personality, is only as relevant as you make it. If you leave the taunt and chat commands alone, you'll only really hear yourself if you're a Heavy: the big guy can't resist cackling deliriously if you're getting a lot of kills, and an extraordinary spree will usually be punctuated with a bellowing "SO... MUCH... BLOOD!"

The other classes' involuntary comments are too quiet and infrequent to hear often, but in a quiet moment I did hear the liquor-chugging Demoman mutter that "On the plus side, I already don't remember this." If, like me, you develop a particular fondness for one character, you can hammer the chat shortcuts and taunts to mutter battlecries at every opportunity.

It was the gas-masked Pyro I fell in love with, and if you're wondering what his voice is like, the answer is a punchline in itself: muffled.

His battle-cry is "Mmmph mm mumph umph!" and his call for a medic is "Mmphumph!"

His dumpy teardrop physique, shrew-like tiny head, waddling gait and baggy, flame-retardant suit - they all evoke an endearingly downtrodden man. So I run everywhere garbling incomprehensible insults, rocking out on my fireaxe over my crispy fallen foes, and waving my bent petrol-pump flamethrower exultantly over my head after every match; win or lose. "Mmmph mm mumph umph!"

Most maps kick off with the two teams separated by a metal mesh that lifts after a minute, giving Engineers time to build their defences and everyone else a chance to taunt each other. The result is two rows of people jeering, singing, laughing, braying, dancing and whooping at each other in a cacophony of clashing voices.

It's a long-needed outlet for our natural tendency to pre-game smack talk, and it makes the atmosphere of the calm before the storm electric.

TF2 comes with six maps; three are new, three are remakes. The roster doesn't feel slim once you play them. Hydro, a control-point map split into six zones, restructures itself between rounds to put teams into one of 16 different configurations.

The others are mostly a linear series of control points - all except Gravelpit, which gives attackers a choice of two to assault, and 2Fort, which remains stubbornly Capture The Flag. Capture The Intelligence, sorry.

All are heartbreakingly gorgeous. The soft lines, gentle shading, warm palettes and wonky edges set off the gaudy action magnificently. It's tempting to pussyfoot around with weasel words such as 'among', 'could be' and 'in years', but screw it. Team Fortress 2 is the most beautiful game ever made.

I say that as a man who's seen Crysis running on maximum settings, and I'm not kidding or exaggerating or on any more than the usual amount of drugs. Sorry about that, every other videogame artist in the world. This was not your lifetime.

Granary and Well are a little straightforward flow-wise, but TF2 sometimes benefits from a simpler arena. A linear series of control points might not sound like a lot of fun, but the simplicity shifts the focus to tactics and clever use of classes.

My team won a round when another player crept behind the enemy lines to camp their locked-off control point, capturing it the moment it came into play. This despite the fact that he - presumably inadvertently - announced his plan to the entire enemy team by using 'say' instead of 'team say'. The post-game chat revealed that they didn't take it well:

EricS: We're actually going to have to erect flood barriers from all the QQing going on over here.
Finole: I need a raft.
Robin of Death: Driller's quit FPSs.
Robin of Death: And the company.

Gravelpit is a more interesting equation: the defending team has to guess which of three tall towers the attacking team is going to gun for first. Dustbowl, meanwhile, is sure to be a cult favourite all over again: it retains the deafeningly chaotic opening, the succession of increasingly bloody chokepoints and the desperate last stand. 2Fort is faithful to the classic original in all but appearance, and makes a particularly rich playground for the more tightly focused classes.

Hydro's more like a set of maps than a single arena, and feels a little arbitrary for it. Valve have made it this way to keep it fresh, but I'm not sure multiplayer maps need to be fresh. CS's de_dust is great partly because we all know it so well - so is 2Fort, for that matter.

Hydro's hypermagical rejiggling just extends the period for which you're not really sure where you're going. We won't know for months whether it was worth this to keep mixing things up, and I'm happy to bear with Valve's experiment for now - some parts of Hydro are superb.

The initial confusion of Hydro does highlight a real shortcoming of TF2, though: no minimap. Only the most co-ordinated, voice-communicating hardcore clan has any useful notion of where their team-mates are.

In a game where the nine different classes are so interdependent, it's vital to know where your turrets are set up, whether there's a Medic nearby, and if the Heavy cavalry is on its way. Valve's logic in omitting it is that some players never use them. Fine for those guys, but there's no substitute for the rest of us to knowing where our team is without having to ask everyone all the time.

Mind you, a minimap would make the Spy's life harder. He was always Team Fortress's most inventive class, but his new incarnation is even more extraordinary. He can disguise himself impeccably as any class of enemy, and now he can also render himself temporarily invisible to slip into their base. There's no friendly fire in TF2, but shooting all your team-mates to uncover Spies wastes too much time and ammo to be practical.

As a Spy in disguise you still take damage from enemies, but you're man enough not to show it - you don't bleed. That gives rise to a hilarious mindgame: a good Spy will take a near-lethal shotgun blast to the face from a supposed friend without flinching, confront his attacker toe-to-toe as if to say "What?", and continue his infiltration beyond suspicion.

The Spy's disguise-o-meter, built into his cigarette case, will give him the name of an enemy who really is the class he's pretending to be. That means that every now and then, you experience the alarming existential crisis of encountering someone with your own name. Realising they must be an enemy Spy, you declare to your team that "The Spy's a Soldier!" Whereupon, of course, everyone empties their magazines into you.

If you can stay away from your namesake and take the Spy hunter's check-shots unflinchingly, the challenge becomes to act like an enemy. I like to dress up as a Heavy, because his reassuringly enormous size makes it hard for anyone to believe he could be a slinky Spy in disguise. It also means you get healed by enemy Medics - a peculiar sensation - and that can lead to an utterly bizarre psychological dance.
The Spy, you see, needs to get behind his victim for a one-hit-kill backstab.

The Medic, meanwhile, should always stay behind a Heavy for protection while he heals. So the two of you run in circles trying to get behind each other, until the Medic realises - with an almost visible pang of horror - who you really are.

He draws his bonesaw, you draw your butterfly knife, and the duel commences. It's sublime. The knife-edge between the thrill of deception and the shame of discovery makes playing a Spy more tense and thrilling than any other multiplayer experience - even the original TF's Spy.

The other class highlights are more obvious: shredding a dozen enemies as a Medic-boosted Heavy, bolting past a superior force as a Scout with the briefcase in 2Fort, and detonating enough pipe bombs as a Demoman to fill the room with blood - and the screen with kill reports. In fact, the only class that doesn't excite is the Medic.

His contribution is to heal the major players while they charge in, but he can't do anything else while he heals so his whole life is just holding down fire. When he's healed a thousand or so points, he can temporarily make himself and his mark invulnerable, at which point he has to... keep holding down fire. It's so cruel that he doesn't get to let rip after all that joyless service to his team.

I have to admit that this, and the minimap problem, bothered me less and less the more I played. Team Fortress 2's friendly look hides what's still a dauntingly intricate game, and when you're still learning the ropes, and the maps, its few flaws seem exasperating.

But the measure of a multiplayer game is how much you want to go back to it. Right now I'm quivering a little, and last night I dreamt about it, so yeah. Team Fortress 2 is a bit special.

Tom Francis