Team Fortress 2 Initial Impressions

I played my second night of Team Fortress 2 last night. It has the important advantage over Guild Wars PvP that if the baby wakes up mid-game it's not a major disaster.

Valve may have taken their sweet time getting this game out, but clearly they spent a good amount of time polishing it. It's surprisingly forgiving for an online shooter - unlike Natural Selection, Quake Wars or the Battlefield lines, where noobitude is punished heavily - I felt that I was actually helping my team despite being terrible.

Art direction is excellent throughout and the game design is solid. I'd say my major criticisms are:

• I prefer the capture-the-flag mode over capture-the-point, but there's only one CTF map.


• There's a bit of a dearth of maps all round. I assume Valve is relying on the game community to fill this gap.


• No bot support means no lunchtime games at the office.

For what it's worth, right now my favourite class is the Demoman - in a world where capture-the-point is the most common game type, area denial via sticky bombs and grenade spam is clearly strong. Quick caveat here: given that I only started playing, any tactical insights I have at this point should be basically ignored.