Bioshock

I have never been a huge fan of the FPS genre. I love multiplayer gaming, but when it comes to FPS and RTS games people tend to get so good so fast that it’s nearly impossible to keep competitive. Sure, I’ll play a single player FPS now and then. I was a huge fan of Bioshock, and I hear that people are crazy for the Haloz, but I don’t have the same reaction to them that I do to RPGs.

I’ll admit it: I never played Half-Life. I bought, but never completed, Half-Life 2. I played a little Counterstrike now and again, but only when the servers were down in World of Warcraft (or whatever MMO I was currently playing). So, when I started seeing videos of this Team Fortress 2 I was only slightly interested. This is of course until the “Meet the X” campaign began. I suddenly saw that this was not the typical FPS. This was a game that understood it’s players. It was a game with a whole lot of style, a talented art team, and a whole lot of humor batched in. I started to see what there might be a bit of quality batched here.

After getting my hands on the game for awhile, I feel very safe to say that this is the best multiplayer experience I’ve had outside of an MMO since Diablo 2. The game is fast paced. Sure it comes with the same frustrations that any First Person Shooter tends to incite (“Where the #%#$ did he come from, What the @#$%# is shooting me?”), but I still can’t help but laugh even after seeing my own foot lying on the ground with a little label telling me of its origin. It really helps to take the edge off a typically tense genre when the game refuses to take itself seriously.

However, I think what really separates TF2 from herd is the intense team dynamic. Most first person shooters pigeon-hole the player into one type of play style. Whether its Counterstrike, Halo, Half-life, or whatever you’re play style is determined only by the type of gun you choose to pick up. Team Fortress 2 has 9 classes that each have important roles in the victory of the team. However, playing a Scout is a very different experience than playing a Spy. While a Spy’s role may be sneak behind enemy lines and take out a few of those annoying sentry turrets or drop the medic that is about to turn the heavy into an unstoppable killing machine, the scout’s role is to rely on its speed to capture the point or return the intelligence. Meanwhile the Medics, Soldiers, and so on all have their own role in the fight if there is any hope of emerging victorious.

Team Fortress 2 is part of the Orange Box, and is available on Steam October 10th, or you can pre-order it now and begin playing it this very minute! Check out past the Jump for some videos.

Edit: Feel free to friend me on Steam if you’re looking for a Medic friend – Hiphopopotomus

Kris