Team Fortress 2 ; A real alternative? › TF2, how does it work? (If you’ve played it, you don’t need to read this)

Team Fortress 2, how does it work? (If you’ve played it, you don’t need to read this)

For those of you that haven’t played either the original or the sequel, here’s how the game works. The game itself is made up of classes, very similar to ET and similarly enough, each class plays an integral role in attack and defence on a variety of game types and maps. The classes are split into 3 classes; Offensive, Defensive and Support. Here’s a small class breakdown.

Offensive

Soldier

The soldier is basically your smash and grab. With a lot of health and a rocket launcher, this class can get to places no one else can and when he’s there, he can do some serious damage. The rockets aren’t overpowered and only really do serious damage if they directly hit a target, so you need to have some skill to be able to hit people and more importantly, pre-aim people on the move.

Scout

Scouts are like the opposite of a soldier. Low health but these guys can move really quick. Amazing for picking up an objective and equipped with a baseball bat that can do some serious damage. They can even so a nifty double jump to avoid enemy fire. Sounds overpowered but once you get a rocket or two onto these guys, they are owned in seconds.

Heavy

Your main push and grind class is your heavy. They move relatively slow but have even more health than the Soldier and are equipped with a mini-gun. Once they get there mini gun spinning up close, they mince through anything. The main downside to the Heavy class is their speed and lack of range to kill things. They are basically only good for one thing, smashing through defenses.

Defensive

Engineer

When you're trying to defend a game, you want to have someone who can play an engineer very well. They can build all sorts. Sentry guns, ammo dispensers, teleport pads, you name it and these guys can build it. If a Sentry gun is placed correctly, these guys are the main thrust of a defensive line. However, your sentries are weak, so a good engineer needs to be able to quickly move his defences in a flash and also maintain them against constant waves of enemies.

Demoman

Equipped with grenades launchers and a time detonated version as well, the demoman becomes a potent combination for defending, along side the likes of an Engineer or Pyro.

Pyro

Nothing complex about a Pyro. They have flamethrowers that cause serious amounts of damage and continue to burn a target long after the flames have stopped being dosed all over an enemy player. No nonsense, Pyros break up attacks and allow for defenses to regroup. Although personally, I think Pyros are better used in an attacking setup but maybe that's just my opinion.

Support

Medic

The medics in this game are very different from ET. Similarly to ET, they regenerate health however, they cannot health themselves with packs. Medics are in the game to do one thing, heal. Equipped with a healing “hose”, they can easily keep 5 or 6 team-mates alive with fast switching and good reactions. They don’t have the ability to revive team-mates, so having an overview of the people around you is a must. They are although equipped with a syringe like gun but it’s mainly to stop people from killing you in dire situations. Most of the time you need to rely on the people around you to protect you. Medics also have an additional feature called an uber-charge. Once a medic has healed his team-mates a certain amount, he has the ability to use an uber-charge. Now the uber-charge once activated, makes the medic and the person he is using the uber-charge on immune to any damage for about 5-10 seconds. This is a perfect way to smash through a defence and to stop classic cock-blocks on certain maps. This also gives the opposing team the added incentive of killing medics before they’ve healed enough to be able to use an uber-charge as once you die, your uber-charge resets.

Sniper

The sniping system in TF2 is much like the sniping system in the original game. If you zoom in with the sniper, you will see a red/blue dot appear in your crosshair. The longer you are zoomed in, the brighter this dot appears and after a few seconds, will be at its brightest/most powerful. This sounds really crappy, but even 50% shots can do a lot of damage, so a good sniper will range his shots for different targets/situations.

Spy

Much like the Covert Ops in ET, these guys can dress to look like the other team. However, they don’t require uniforms to do so. Also equipped with a cloak, these guys can easily sneak behind enemy lines to cause some major damage. Now on public servers, the people that play spies are simply doing so for cheap kills. In competitive or objective terms however, these guys are the best classes for sneaking around and destroying well placed sentries and dispensers. If you have a guy on your team that plays for the objective and doesn’t require to validate himself with kills, get him to play a spy (Hint overdrive).





Those are the classes and there are two types of game-types. The first is a simple “capture the flag” type affair. With symmetrical maps, it’s been seen before. Still good fun with the new elements, it offers a nice taste of TF2 but it’s not what an ET player would want from a game they played competitively (Assuming you played ET because the game was about a team playing for an objective and less about individual frags and glory).

The other game-type however “Domination”, is a control point based affair, much like unreal tournament with advancing stages to control/defend. This really appeals to my inner ET player at least and with each advancing stage you are offered a new challenge to overcome in achieving your final objective. Certain classes are required in certain situations and unlike ET where a player would perhaps play a combination of Field Ops and Medic, this game-type can see a player playing 3 or 4 different classes to suite each point of a map.

I don’t want to explain everything in the game, as that would be like asking someone to explain all the ET maps, what classes work best where and when in relation to competitive gaming, for each individual map. It would take about 40 pages. :P

There are plenty of videos and pictures on http://orange.half-life2.com/tf2.html if you want to see and read more about the game.