Team Fortress 2: BETA

After eight long years of agonising waiting, valve has finally seen fit to release a second Team Fortress game. To save the lazy among you from reading the whole thing, it's good.

The new game pays homage to the original without slavishly clinging to its rotting, eight year old corpse. A good thing, cause in todays market I don't think the original, Team Fortress: Grenade Spam, would have held anyone's attention for very long.

The developers also took a step away from the norm with the graphics. Instead of making yet another, "oh-my-god our light maps and textures look a little bit more freakishly, almost real than yours" game, they went with a neat, semi cell shaded look that look different and fabulous.

More importantly, the graphics add to the usability of the game. Instead of squinting as a bunch of drab brown models in a drab green and brown landscape you can easily spot and identify the various classes. the whole point of a First Person SHOOTER is to shoot stuff. Not to spend half the game trying to see something so you can shoot it. TF2 makes it nice and easy, you can easily identify the enemy and SHOOT them, which is the point after all.

The classes are reasonably well balanced with the exception of the 'WTF PWN" Spy and the Engineer's turrets being piss weak. But it's still in Beta so I assume they will get fixed.

I'll do another update when the full version lands on 12 October.

Cheers

DTN.