I have never played TF1 and I have spent only a few hours with TFC, so when I went into TF2 I was pretty much a blank slate.
And my thoughts: Best online shooter ever.
First and foremost, the game is just massive amounts of fun. Even if you're bad at the game, it's hard to not enjoy it. The visual style makes the simple act of looking at the screen an absolute joy, something very few games actually manage. All the sounds are great, the voice acting is awesome and the classes' phrases are perfectly worded and the voices to go with them are ideal.
There is a large variety of classes, each of which plays very differently to all the others, so the game almost feels like nine games in one in a way. You can play as one class and then get a completely different gameplay experience as another.
There are only a handful of maps with the original game (6?) but some have multiple routes through the map that are randomly opened and locked off with each new round, so some maps retain their freshness for a long time. The gameplay mode is determined by the map, so the experience you get is tied to the map, and each map is specifically designed for a particular role.
The game is, unsurprisingly, very team oriented. This is the finest thing about the game. With the focus not on the individual, this means that the simple act of killing the enemy is not the main focus of the game. To that end, killing is mostly pretty easy. Only snipers can score headshots, and there is no zonal damage. It's mostly just pointing and shooting at large, moderately slow moving targets for the most part. Almost anyone can do it. What you need to be able to do is play off the strengths of the other classes, play your class correctly and work as a unit to achieve the objectives.
This often means that your team is either doing well as a whole, or doing badly as a whole. If you're a bad player on a good team, you'll probably actually do well. If you're playing on a bad team, you won't do so well, but it won't feel like it's your own personal failings. Some people can get very frustrating with online FPS games, especially when death means a five minute wait, but with TF2, I just don't ever see that.
Everything about the game is oriented towards having fun, and playing as a team. I've never had as much fun in an online FPS, and it's reconverted me to online FPS games. A genre I had abandoned back when CS went to 1.3. It's very popular, by the way.
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