The Orange Box: Team Fortress 2 (PC)

The sequel that took 10 years to make turns out to be well worth the wait.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Some classes are built for easy play: the pyro fights with a flamethrower, which essentially splashes fire indiscriminately (Team Fortress 2 is designed to be played without friendly fire) -- no aiming needed; the medic tags along behind teammates firing a healing tendril that automatically attaches to his companions. But even for these easy classes, there are deeper levels of gameplay. The pyro is important for revealing disguised spies posing as your teammates (they'll catch fire, unlike your actual teammates) and the medic has the ability to build up an über-charge that makes a teammate invulnerable for a brief period of time.

And then there are the more demanding classes, such as the spy who plays cat-and-mouse, the demo man who's all about ricochets and timing grenades, or the engineer who can change the entire flow of a map with a well-placed turret, dispenser, or teleporter. There's a place in the grand scheme of things for every class. If you think your class sucks, you're not playing it right.

As an online game, Team Fortress 2 takes great advantage of Steam's community features. It's easy to set up a friends list and keep track of where and how your friends are playing. It's all very clan-friendly. Even if you're not tapped into the social elements, the stat tracking is a great Steam trick for sucking you in. It's like a combination of the Gamerscore achievements on Xbox Live and trying to beat your own high scores on an arcade videogame. Your performance is constantly tracked and compared to your previous games, including stats for the most kills you ever got, the longest you stayed alive, and the most damage you've done. It'll even track who's killed you most often in a given match, with a special pat on the back if you turn around and kill him. Team Fortress 2 is paying attention to you, and it's not shy about letting you know it.

This is a fast game, which makes it perfect for being played in short spurts -- which manage to inadvertently stretch out into several hours at a time. Matches tend to be short, life spans even shorter. It plays best with at least 10 players on each team, but it lends itself to all sorts of mixing and matching. It's not uncommon to find a team doing an all-scouts bum-rush, for instance. That the game bears up under these shenanigans is a testament to Valve's fine tuning.

With Team Fortress 2, it's as if the genre has come full circle. The original Team Fortress was an ambitious Quake mod made over 10 years ago. And its developers, now working internally at Valve, have outdone themselves by taking something they did a decade ago and making it feel brand-new, exciting, accessible, and unabashedly contemporary. Here's to hoping history repeats itself like this more often.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.