I downloaded the TF2 beta last week. Between the really nice deal that is The Orange Box, and the fact that I'd been feeling like I wanted to be involved with at least one phenomenon this year while it was actually happening (as opposed to the year (or more) later bargain shopping I normally engage in).
TF2 is a first person shooter. As you might gather from the name, it's team based. A lot of FPS games make that claim, but few deliver like TF2. I listened to the commentary tracks they have for three of the levels, and the designers are very explicit about (among other things) that they wanted to make sure the classes needed each other. Heavies are slow (super slow while firing their mini-gun) and attract a lot of attention, so they need a medic to stay standing. Snipers are great at range, but are likely to get demolished by most other classes at close range. Scouts are quick and pack some real punch, but generally get destroyed by the engineer's turrets because of their low health. The Demo Man can bust up groups of enemies with his grenades and lay nasty traps with his "pipe bombs". (They look more like tiny mines, to me.) But he's weak at a distance where his projectiles can be easily avoided. There are nine classes, so I could go on about this all day. These are the early days of the game, so no dominant strategies have emerged yet. Hopefully the game will prove balanced enough that other than having a diverse team and a few sentries in key positions, the game never will get too stale.
The Pyro is the only character people seem have little use for. I love the Pyro, personally, but I don't mind sucking as long as I get to set people on fire once in a while. Also the Pyro has hilarious voice samples. You can't understand any of them because of the protective mask he wears. Totally worthless, but awesome (some would argue just like the Pyro himself). On servers with friendly fire enabled, I would say the Pyro is indeed, nearly worthless. Most servers don't enable FF, though, so the Pyro is great at detecting enemy spies by giving everyone a squirt. If the spy is detected, he keeps burning, even if he cloaks, so a couple shotgun blasts can finish the job.
Friendly fire's a thorny issue, though. Should a Pyro be able to run into a room while a friendly Demo Man's grenades are going off all around him and a medic is standing in the middle of the inferno he's creating, healing him? It seems favor the offense a little, doesn't it? True, the defenders can have a Pyro, Medic, and Demo Man of their own at work, but as long as the people on the point live, the point is being captured. I don't really mind this emphasis on offense. In theory it keeps the matches short. But there are some "achievements" linked to defending on certain maps that are more a matter of lucking into a very unbalanced team situation rather than actual skill.
Of course, if you don't care for luck, just keep joining until you get an open slot on a clan server, with the clan. The clan teams are already forming the dominant strategies. Playing against them is like trying to rally The Washington Generals. Remember, we're not even out of beta yet, and some people are already putting "newbie friendly" or "new players welcome" in the server name so people won't be scared off. Of course, that's somewhat true of all games. You don't go onto a clan server for CounterStrike and expect to win. But you do expect to be able to get kills. And if you're working against a well oiled machine in TF2, that might not be very realistic.
That scout was charged up by the medic to 150% health, so he's not likely to go down so quick, and if you do wound him and try to chase him back to the medic, the engineer's got a nice upgraded turret waiting for you, provided you make it past the pipe bombs the Demo Man laid and the Sniper, covering that big open area. Yeah, you're pretty much boned.
But that's mostly me trying to find fault. Nobody else (including Bungie) has managed to make skill based matchmaking work.
The game is a lot of fun. It looks great. It keeps a high framerate, even on my older machine. And if you break down The Orange Box into the three new offerings (Portal, Episode 2, and TF2), it's only $15. If you're a gamer you want it (or you have it already).
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