"Whaaaa-waaa Do I hear someone crying?" - Heavy Weapons Guy upon crit'ing TF2 griefers
Graphics:
The are direction on this game is top notch. It kind of reminds me of Toontown at Disneyland, except everything there is armed and quite lethal. When I first saw the promos for the game I was really turned off at the thought of a cartoon game as a prompt for a first person shooter. After having seen it all in motion I have to admit that it works really well. When it is all assembled together it works a lot like a full motion adventure from Itchy and Scratchy. You can't help but laugh when you see a rocket connect and the opponent gibs everywhere. More over the animation on the characters is hilarious and provide each class a unique and colorful personality. Whether its the Heavy Weapons guy's facial animation during his maniacal laugh while he is unloading an unholy amount of ammo, or the scout jogging in place and checking his pulse before a match the animation goes to build up each classes role. On top of that the use of dynamic lighting and shader effects go to make sure that each class is easily recognizable from virutally any distance. Everything graphics wise is built to enhance the game experience. Massive gibs make it obvious that the opponent is no longer a threat, moreover explosion effects, shiny colorful sticky bombs and bright believable flames remind you that there are lethal consequences for sitting to long to admire the graphics. My only gripe is that a few of the ground textures could use a little bit of work. The game performs admirably on the Source engine and provide the high quality scaling that we have come to expect from this company, although it doesn't provide the same level of eyecandy that Quake or UT3 has in spades. I will say that the art in this game is above and beyond most games released in the past year, with the most notable exception being Bioshock.
Sound:
I'm not a huge fan of video games sound tracks in fact, I can't really tell you what most games sound like because the sfx on most games make me crazy and I end up listening to my favorite music while only keeping the minimal sfx required to progress in a game. While I still jam a bit of Foo Fighters in the background I can't enjoy the game with out the Russian Heavy taunting the engineers, "Poor baby's coward toys get broken?" or the scout's "Batter Up!" after throughly pummeling an opponent. The sounds work well and having a shot gun blast near by provides a convincing warning of your impending death. The in-game voice comm system is perfunctory adding the essential relay for warning teammates and co-ordinating attacks. Generally sfx add to the experience Splats, groans, and gunfire works well and plays into the comic mayhem. It's silly but its not slide whistle silly. But most importantly there isn't any music aside from the intro. I love that no obnoxious themes get burned into your brain, but if you own the sound track to Final Fantasy the lack of ambiance might leave you wanting.
Gameplay:
Yay. TF2 is the definitive experience for team based combat. You have to depend on your teammates to cover where you lack. If you play scout, you need help taking care of sentry guns and pyros, but you're the best at taking down contol points, clearing heavies and dropping snipers. If you play medic you can provide a limited invulnerability making you arguably the best offensive player in the game, with the immediate side effect of not being able to deal any damage while healing. With that said the medic has one of the best melee weapons, providing an important balance mechanic. All of the characters have a secondary weapon and a down right hilarious melee weapon. The secondary weapon provides a means of doing things that your class isn't good at. For example, the pyro is the god of close range combat, capable of dealing arguably the most dps, but thier primary weapon is so range limited that you have to able to sneeze on em bofore you can hit them. The secondary weapon allows you to shoot someone far away, not real far, but much further than the flamethrower. Likewise the shot gun provides the heavy a way to run and gun instead of having to plant and let loose the six barreled death. Each class plays differently and provides a unique experience in taking down the various classes. Although personally I don't have the patience to play engineer very long. (Don't worry though there are TONS of people who love this class and it is like pulling teeth to get them to change if there are too many). It need to be pointed out that there is a lack of maps, but with that said when was the last time a CS player jumped on a server that wasn't playing dust, dust2, office, the england one, italy, or the warehouse? Personally I will gladly take a handful of very well crafted levels over a bunch of crap.
General gameplay works well too. The game is very fast paced and frenetic with some of the craziest firefights I've seen in a while. Eventhough the game has several blink and you miss it moments, the action and characters and never so fast that you don't know what's going on. The classes are slow moving enough that you don't need to be a l337 (that's 'elite' for the uninitiated gamers) clanner to get a kill in. And because the game play is so team oriented it lessens the learning curve. If a n00b comes along and does what the more experienced players tell him to, he can easily rise to the top of the leader board. Eventhough it'll be a while before he's barking out order himself, he'll definately be a part of the carnage. Sadly, many of the old TF guys are turned off by this fact. They miss being able to single handedly clear the board and win the map. I think that this is the main complaint from the community aside from the lack of all class grenades. I personally don't miss the "what the..?" moments of getting nuked by a grenade from who knows where, or spawning, taking two steps, and then dying unexplainably. To combat moments like those, when you get capped in TF2 it shows you who did it and where they did it from. So if you are astute you shouldn't get capped by the same sniper in the same place twice, making snipping a far more dynamic experience. Granted you probably will get capped twice by the same sniper in the same place and when that happens you get DOMINATED. A fun little way to make taking down an opponent a little more rewarding. If you kill the same player three times in a row you dominate them and its worth more points. Nothing is quite as fun as dominating half of a team. The main game play style is a king of the hill control point style map. The idea is easy to understand, if you have a control point you need to keep it, if you don;t have a control point you want to take it back. Easy right? Then there is the one capture the flag map. I personally love the Hydro and dustbowl maps. Hydro is a dynamic control point map and dustbowl is a pure attack or defend map. Stat tracking is nice too cause it lets you know exactly how well you're doing. The amount of fine tuning in this game is superb. Everything from visuals to sfx goes into making game play better. Superfluous details and inconsequential
Also there are critical hits, if you start killing a lot and doing tons of damage you get more crits, and thusly do more damage. Plus the crits help out in last ditch defences or clearing impossibly well defended areas.
Last but certainly not least is that the way the classes play off each other allows for a huge level of strategy and replayability.
Conclusion:
If you like being the master murderer on a map and don't like playing nice with others then you might want to look at Quake wars or UT3, but if you don't mind sharing the spotlight and working for a very interesting and dynamic game TF2 is an absolute blast.