Pong and Beyond

289th played so far

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: PC/PS3/XBox 360
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: Valve Corporation
Publisher: Valve Corporation

We recently played (well, nearly two years ago… how time flies, right?) Team Fortress Classic, a multiplayer-only FPS (bots in practice mode) based on Half-Life that became quite big. So big, in fact, that Valve made a sequel.

When it went free to play, the game became one of the most played games on Steam (second after Dota 2 at the time of writing) and the oldest game in the top five.

We needed to catch up on our FPS games anyway, so here it goes.

Our Thoughts

Similar to how our Team Fortress Classic could partially reference Half-Life, the basics of Team Fortress 2 can easily reference Team Fortress Classic. The basics remain the same – multiple classes in an FPS context, lots of multiplayer PvP team games – capture the flag and such.

The game’s received an upgrade in looks, being (obviously) based on the superior Half-Life 2 engine we also saw in Portal. It shows, the game looks nicer – not always too realistic, but more colourful and pleasant to walk around. Part of the reason for this is that the extra options are used on the game’s own style. The game is described as cartoony, and while it’s not as exaggerated as some other examples, or as comic book-like as, say, Borderlands, it creates the right sort of irreverence that makes it all less serious and a more of a game. If there was an art-style it resembled it would be the latter entries in the Timesplitters franchise (oh how I miss them).

Added to that is the voice acting. True, there isn’t much of it – there’s no real point for it in a game like this. But what is there fits in nicely. The different classes all have their own personality and make comments as you play. The big thing are comments about the start of the game, but there’s also things like thanking the medic. They’re more or less pre-scripted, but add enough to give you a good impression of the characters.

Down to gameplay, the game doesn’t really offer anything overly new.  The game modes are changed and polished, but are basically what you’ve already seen. The improvements come in with the polish. The game feels tight and balanced (once you know what you’re doing), there are clear roles and no matter what you do, you can feel effective and have fun.

There’s one (relatively) recent development we can’t say much about as we haven’t really gone into it yet. The game went free to play in 2011, supported by in-game purchases such as hats (aka, useless equipment) and other items. You can get some of these just by playing as well, but getting the special hats are mostly through payments. They didn’t really impact play, so we didn’t have a look, but it’s the next step in video game payments and all that so I suppose it’s meant to be awesome. Yeah.

Final Thoughts

What it comes down to is that the game is one of those pinnacle games. It doesn’t introduce really novel elements, but what it does, it does so well that it reaches near-perfection. It’s why it plays so well and is just so much fun (especially as the assassin… hell yeah)