Introduction
Team Fortress 2, commonly abbreviated as just TF2, probably does not need an introduction. If you've been on the internet, you've probably seen the characters from this game used in all sorts of parodies, thanks to the sister program Source Filmmaker. This game is over a decade old and yet it still has 6 figure player counts, while many newer games struggle to find an audience. The question I wondered was simple, is this just people who refuse to switch to newer games, or is there an inherent appeal to the game not being served by other titles, one that is understandable even to those new to the game? So, I decided to play the game in 2023 to find out for myself if this game is fun.
A quick note
This review is going to be primarily on the play experience. While I do believe that the aesthetics of the game are very important, I feel that I am ill-equipped to analyze that aspect of the game. It is also a lot easier for someone to judge how it game looks from a picture than it is to judge how a game plays from a picture, which is where I hope this review will be a more adequate explanation. Also, I do believe that while the aesthetics of a game can be a pretty big reason for somebody trying a game, it is ultimately how fun that game is to play that keeps people coming back years later. A good looking game with bad game design is worse than a bad looking game with good design. So what this review is going to focus on is the design, the multiplayer experience, with a particular leaning to what the game is like as a new player who does not have experience with this game or similar games. I will not be exploring Mann Versus Machine in this review, as that is effectively it's own separate game that got stuffed into TF2. I will eventually make a part 2 where I talk about it in-depth at a later time. I will also not be discussing this game as a competitive eSport as I have not competed in any Leagues as of writing this article.
How the game works
TF2 is a team based first person shooter in which 24 players divided into two teams of 12 each compete to complete various objectives, the exact one depending on the map on which the game is played. The core map types are Attack/Defend, Control Points, King of the Hill, Payload, and Capture the Flag. Attack/Defend features the red team having to prevent the blue team from capturing two points on the map. To capture the point, the blue team must stand on the point until it turns blue. The more players there are standing on the point, the faster it changes color. If even one member of the opposing team is standing on the point, capture is impossible. If blue team captures the points before time runs out, they win. Control Points change this dynamic by having both teams have points to capture. At the beginning of a control point game, both teams have an equal number of points, with the point in the middle belonging to nobody. The team points can only be captured if your team controls the middle point. King of the Hill changes this dynamic down to a single control point in the center. Capturing the control point starts a timer, and if the timer runs out before the opposing team can take the control point, that team wins. Payload returns the Attack/Defend dynamic, but instead of a static control point, blue team must push a bomb from one side of the map to the other, with more players pushing causing the bomb to move faster. Finally is Capture the Flag, the ugly duckling of the core game modes. It is typical flag capturing affair, bring the enemy flag from their base to your base to get a point, get 3 points to win. Capture the Flag is pretty infamous in TF2 for just not working properly, due to their being no time limit and having the unique possibility of a never ending stalemate. Because of this, the players treat Capture the Flag maps more as hangout maps where actually attempting to complete the objective is frowned upon.
TF2 is a class based shooter. I say class instead of heroes because while these characters do have set personalities and abilities, you are meant to customize them to make them distinctly you, through a combination of cosmetics and equipping your preferred weapons. The classes can generally be divided into a few distinct categories. Power classes are best when put directly on the objective, due to being either difficult to take out or having a high damage output that makes it hard to approach. Support classes are able to give aid to their teammates in various ways, either by countering their weaknesses or protecting them from harm. Roamers tend to serve two roles, killing other roamers, or getting into enemy lines in order to ruin their day before they have a chance to reach the rest of your team. Pick classes have one goal, take out the most dangerous member of the enemy team when nobody else can. While classes can be divided into these categories, they do not have to be played exclusively that one way. Most of the classes are versatile enough to be played in multiple styles, either due to their base weapons being useful in multiple situations, or can change role through equipping different weapons. However, I will just talk about their most typical role when playing stock, meaning what weapons they have equipped when you first boot up the game.
Scout is designed to be a roamer, as the fastest class in the game. His scatter gun is able to rip through opponents quickly, provided he is able to get within close proximity to them. His weakness is having low Health Points, meaning while it is easy to get a kill with Scout, it is also easy to get killed with him. The Scout also has a unique ability, which is that the Scout counts as 2 people for the purposes of objectives. Because of this one stat, it can be possible for a lone Scout to win the game simply by running to the objective and dodging enemy attacks until the point is captured. While a very simple class to understand, it is very rewarding to play as you gradually perfect your raw mechanical skill.
Soldier can be played as either a power class or a roamer. His signature rocket launcher can deal massive damage when you hit them directly, but the true power of the rocket comes from the explosion, allowing soldier to hit multiple enemies at the same time. While it may seem like he is unsuited to roaming, moving much slower than Scout, he can actually achieve fast speeds by shooting himself with his own rockets, known as Rocket Jumping. However, since rocket jumping requires you to trade your health for speed, Soldiers have to plan their routes carefully to ensure that wherever they end up is not within a horde of enemies that can punish the sacrifice of health.
Pyro can feel like a power class at first, as the flamethrower can make approaching the Pyro feel like a death sentence. But due to low speed and inability to fight at long range, the true role of the Pyro is defense. The flamethrower can prevent enemies from approaching the important members of your team, punishing both roamers and picks for getting too arrogant. What certifies Pyro as a defender is the air blast. When activated on a teammate while they are on fire, it will extinguish the flames, along with giving the Pyro 20 Health Points. When used on an enemy, it will push them with great force where the Pyro is looking, allowing you to keep the enemy away from yourself and your team (and if you're lucky, you can push them off a nearby ledge). Another less obvious but equally powerful use of the air blast is that it reflects all projectiles, including dangerous explosives, allowing you to remove dangerous hazards from your path and protect your team from incoming fire. The reflected projectiles deal extra damage to the enemy team as well, so an ill-prepared opponent can find themselves turned into ash by their own attack.
Demoman is a power class, being the only class to have two explosive weapons, the grenade launcher and the sticky bomb launcher. The grenades are much like the rockets, however while the main reason to use the rockets was for their splash damage, the main reason to use the grenades is for their damage on a direct hit. Unlike the rockets however, the grenades have weight and travel in an arc, allowing you to attack enemies that are hiding behind cover, although it does make them harder to use. However the highlight of the Demoman, and the main way to deal massive explosive damage is the Sticky Bombs. You can have up to 8 sticky bombs out at once, and they are fired in a similar manner to the grenade launcher. However, while grenades automatically detonate, the sticky bombs will not deal damage until you manually detonate them, dealing massive explosion damage to whoever is unfortunate enough to be in range. While you can just fire sticky bombs into a crowd and then immediately detonate them, the true power comes from setting large traps into important areas, forcing enemies to either find another route to the objective or be wiped out instantly with a single button press.
Heavy is probably the character most people think of when they think of a power class. He has high health but low speed, meaning he is unsuited for anything other than sitting on the objective. Luckily, he is well equipped to do so with his mini gun, a machine gun that rips through anyone unfortunate to be on the receiving end of it. Unfortunately, that's about all Heavy can do with his stock weapons, sit on the objective and shoot at anyone that tries to approach. While the most one-dimensional class in the game, he is still a very fun character to play and one to be feared on the battlefield.
Engineer is a support class. His main gimmick is the ability to create various buildings. He can create a sentry gun that automatically shoots any enemies in range, a dispenser that gives ammo and health to your teammates, and a teleporter that allows the team to easily get from Point A to Point B. The Engineer can also upgrade these buildings up to Level 3, providing various bonuses, like the Sentry Gun gaining extra guns and a rocket launcher, the teleporters going faster, and the dispenser able to store more health and ammo. All of this comes at the cost of metal, which is obtained from ammo boxes and dispensers. Enemies can destroy these buildings and whether it be merely repairing them or having to build a brand new one, Engineers have to spend a lot of time and metal to get setup. Because of this, the engineer is encouraged to stay close to his buildings at all times to protect them, in order to ensure his investment does not go to waste. Engineers have to find a balance between being close enough to the action for their buildings to contribute, while being far enough away from the action to make taking out his buildings require the enemy team to have to fight on the objective with less players to deal with him.
The Medic is technically a support class, although he is typically considered part of the power group when considering actual team composition. This is due to him needing to be near teammates to use his Medi Gun, which fires a beam which heals a teammate of your choice. Obviously, you would want to be using this healing power on your strongest teammates to keep them in the fight as long as possible, so you will almost always find the Medic on the frontlines, hiding just behind their teammates backs to avoid getting shot. While playing the Medic may feel like you are very weak, the Medic is actually the most powerful class in the game due to his secondary ability, the Uber charge. When the Medi Gun has the Uber gauge at 100%, the Medic can use the charge to give both himself and one ally complete invincibility for 8 seconds. Using this invincibility, it becomes quite easy to completely wipe out the entire enemy team in a single push, and can break any stalemate as long as the enemy doesn't also use theirs at the same time. Oftentimes, a game can be decided simply by which team doesn't have a Medic.
The Sniper is a pick class. While near defenseless at close range, when sitting far away with his sniper rifle he can be an oppressive class to fight. While you are scoped with his sniper rifle, the rifle gradually gains a charge, boosting the amount of damage it does on a hit. However, if you hit an enemy with a head shot, it will automatically kill them regardless of your charge and regardless of how much health they had. Because of this one shot potential, a highly skilled sniper can be the most frustrating enemy to face. However, his inability to fight at close distances makes him useless at actually capturing the objective, balancing out his power.
The Spy is the peak pick class. The Spy shares the ability to one shot any enemy like the Sniper, but while the Sniper can do this at long range, The Spy must get up close to the enemy with his Knife and stab them from behind. Luckily for the Spy, he has two unique abilities at his disposal to help him do that. His cloak allows him to turn completely invisible, which allows him to sneak up on enemies without getting shot at. However, since you can't attack while invisible, and turning off your cloak makes a loud sound effect, you'll need to use a disguise to truly close that distance. You can choose to look like any of the 9 classes in the game and have either team color, although most of the time you'll want to look like you're part of the enemy team. If someone on the enemy team is playing the class you selected, your disguise will have their cosmetics and you will temporarily have their name tag. Your disguise is lost the instant you try to attack, so you must choose the most optimal moment to make your move, or you might find yourself dead as the enemy team piles on you. If killing enemies is too difficult, killing sentries might be more your speed, as the Spy also has a Sapper that destroys any buildings it is placed on. The engineer can remove these sappers with his wrench, but distracting himself with building repair leaves him completely vulnerable to getting back stabbed. While his low health leaves him an exceptionally vulnerable class, a skilled Spy can be a menace.
Of course, these roles are only consistent if you only consider their base weapons. With the multiple weapons for each class, you can truly customize these characters to suit how you play. Want Soldier to run around the map at lightning fast speeds with rocket jumps? Equip the Gun Boats to reduce damage from rocket jumps. Want to play Pyro as a roamer? Equip the Phlogistinator and deal triple damage whenever you use your Mmmph meter. Some weapon equips completely change the game mechanics you play with entirely. For example, the Demoman can replace the Sticky Bomb Launcher with a shield that allows him to perform a charge move which makes his melee attacks deal extra damage. Combined with a sword and you have what is referred to by the community as Demo Knight, changing Demoman from a power class to a powerful roamer. With hundreds of possible loadouts for each class, it is only inevitable you will find your preferred way to play the game. The best part of these weapons is that these weapons can be obtained just by playing the game normally, you do not need to spend any money on the game to play with all of the wacky weapons. There is a huge BUT to that, but we will discuss that later.
The Experience
Now that we all have an understanding of how the game actually functions, what is it like to play in practice? This can be a bit tricky to discuss because unlike a majority of games, there is not one single way to play TF2. Perhaps this already can be the reason the game has lasted so long, when you are spoiled for choice you can simply switch game modes rather than playing a different game. However, I will try my best to boil down the experience into something understandable for those who do not play the game regularly.
The New Player Roadblock
The game when booting it up for the first time is an immediate assault of confusing menus, of which you can only discern the purpose of from the title. If a new player manages to click Training first instead of immediately jumping into a game, they will find a tutorial that essentially consists of "hit buttons to do things" and only going over 4 of the 9 classes. That's if it doesn't immediately crash every time you try to load it, which it does on my computer. So, we will be getting no help from the game. Another primary issue with the game is that the default settings are absolutely dreadful, with such confusing settings like having the Field of View set at such a low value that it made me motion sick to move in game. So before you even play the game, you will need to go through all of the game options and tweak them to something a human would actually use, lest you end up with your head hovering over a toilet like myself.
Once you are finally ready to Find a Game, you will find there are multiple options available to pick from, however the only options important are Casual and Community Servers, all others should be ignored for now. Casual is official servers hosted by the company who created the game, and as such is the most pure form of TF2 you can play, at least in theory. Community Servers are hosted by random people like you and me, and can have anything they want in it. It could be normal TF2, it could have custom maps, weapons, characters, or even entirely new game modes. It's a gamble what could be on a community server, but since it is ran by actual people it means you can find yourself a proper community with regular members who play on the same server every week. This also means that you can run your own server, customizing the game to your own personal preferences if you want to, but that's beyond the scope of this review.
Casual
At first the Casual menu is a bit confusing, but the options it has are quite useful. The Casual menu lets you select what game modes you want to play, and you can get more specific by opening the sub menu for each game mode and selecting which maps you want as well. When you hit search, it will look for an official server that is hosting one of the maps you said you want to play that has an empty player slot. If it does not find one it will eventually create a new server. Once you join your casual game you be put onto a team and will have to pick a class. You can edit your weapons for each class from this menu, but it is usually best to do this beforehand from the Item menu. While sometimes you will join in before a match starts, most of the time you will be dropping into a match already in progress and have to figure out what is going on.
It is at this point that you'll most likely find yourself overwhelmed by the sensory overload of 23 other people running around trying to kill each other. While each class is pretty easy to control, trying to figure out how to control them while avoiding getting killed by the enemy can be a pretty annoying experience. Once you have gotten the hang of it though, you might find your team is losing hard, or your team can't seem to be stopped for whatever reason. You may even find yourself getting auto balanced, switching you to the other team in the middle of the game. TF2 does not have ranks, it does not sort players by skill, it just shoves 24 random people into a room together and hope everything works out. This typically means that you will have a team of mostly beginners with 1 to 3 veterans doing most of the work, and the entire success of your team depends on those veterans while the rest of your team flounders around trying to find a way to contribute. Having veterans in your game is not always a bad thing however, as many of them are willing to help new players learn how to be effective in the game, providing general tips or calling out when is the right time to push for the objective. I could not have had as much as I have had with TF2 without the assistance of these skilled players, whether it be telling me about special tricks I can do with my class, warning me when a spy is nearby, telling me the optimal path through a map, or just doing basic things like using Uber at an opportune moment.
It is through the text and voice chat system that puts the Team in Team Fortress. It is where the fun of the game really shines, when you're not just playing the game well, but you are playing well with your team. This is true in any team based game, however the emergent play combined with the massive amount of players on each team means that nobody can truly go it solo. However, you might find it oddly quiet while you are playing for the first time, which is odd for a team based game to just have entirely silent. Well, while that does sometimes happen, if you are a new player and try to talk you might find out you can't communicate at all.
Pay to Talk and the Bot Problem
New accounts can not communicate in any way in an official server unless they buy at least one item on the Mann Co store. Now you might be wondering, why is this a thing? This is due to an ongoing issue with bots. In short, the Valve Anti Cheat software it tells you about while loading into every match is effectively useless. As a result, there are a significant group of people who make multiple accounts and run them, either to spam chat with slurs and loud sounds, run bots that automatically kill every human they see, or flood servers with bots to vote kick all human players from the server. In order to reduce the amount of slurs being flung in official servers, a change was made to remove the ability to talk or kick players on a Free to Play account, expecting that most people running bot accounts would not have the money to buy premium accounts for every single bot. As it turns out, they have the money to buy premium accounts for every single bot, meaning it solved absolutely nothing. While I can go on a tangent about bots like 90% of TF2 players, I will instead direct you to a place where there is not a bot problem, community servers.
Community Servers
Community Servers use their own method of anti-cheat that is much more effective than the official one. As a result, it is a lot easier to find a game that is only humans through the community browser than it is through Casual. This of course comes with two trade offs. The first one is that there needs to be a community server near you that has players in it to take advantage of this. While some groups like Skial and Uncletopia have multiple servers in each region to ensure that you can at least find a server, there isn't a guarantee that there are players. The opposite can also be the case, where every server you want to play in is already full. The second issue is finding a server that hosts something you want to actually play. If a community server isn't hosting the modes you like, or doesn't have maps you like, you're out of luck. Sure, you could try hosting your own server, but that requires money and you're not guaranteed to have players. Overall, while community servers are great, they aren't the end all be all solution and you'll most likely end up back on Casual at some point.
What Community Servers can do that official TF2 can never provide is the community and the creativity. Most servers exist not just as an alternative way to play the game, but as their own social circle with which to make friends. If you play on the same community server on the regular, you will find yourself running into the same people frequently, and you might even become friends with them. A lot of community servers will enable All Chat, allowing players from both teams to use voice chat to talk to each other. This leads to a new genre of server, the chat server. These can be many different things, 24/7 insert map here, death match servers, idle trade servers, the point being to use the game more as a fun way to hang out than as a competitive experience.
Community Servers also allow players to express their creativity. Playing maps created by other players can breathe life into your play experience once you get tired of the normal ones. And if playing the normal game modes has gotten stale too, they have invented all new ways to play as well. 32 player servers with teams of 18, Class Wars where everybody on a team plays the same class, Versus Saxton Hale where one person plays as a super powered Australian Man while everyone else has to fight him as a team. There are slight modifications to the game like multiplying all weapon stats by 10, or randomizing what weapons can do, or making all attacks critical hits. And that's just the modes that stay similar to TF2, there are games like Death Run or Zombie Survival that barely resemble TF2 at all. There are dedicated training servers for learning various mechanics, there are 1 versus 1 servers, there's a server type for every personality if you look hard enough. As long as Community Servers stick around, this game will never die, because fans will always want to make new stuff for their favorite game.
Community
The community is a strange mix of people. This is to be expected with such a large player count, but it means that you could run the gambit of there being a bunch of nice friendly people wanting to just have a good time, or joining a game filled with racists and homophobes saying every heinous thought that comes to their minds. Despite their being a lot of players who are incredibly bigoted, the game is also popular with minority groups, especially those in the LGBT+ community. While I can not say for sure what draws them to play the game, I can say that when I do find a server filled with nice respectful people, it is an experience unlike any I've had in other games. And if you have enough nice people in the server, you can easily get rid of the bad ones using the vote kick feature, bad players are only a problem in groups, much like in real life. Overall, I can say there are just too many TF2 players to say that there is a stereotype you can really apply to the community as a whole.
Trading and Gambling
One aspect of this game I have failed to mention in this game is how it make money. How the game makes money is pretty simple, by being the inventor of the Loot Box. While you are playing the game, you have a random chance of receiving a Case every 30 minutes, however you can also buy a case. You can also instead of getting a Case get a random weapon. You can either go ahead and start using that weapon or you can grind it down into materials with which to craft a weapon you actually want. Getting weapons this way takes a very long time, which may eventually push you into buying the weapons you want to skip the hassle of waiting for the weapons you want to show up. While weapons may be annoying but easy to understand, Cases are a bit more complicated. To open a Case, you need to buy a key from the Mann Co Store. You can then get items of various rarities, most of them worthless. The one thing you are opening any case for is Unusuals, items which have unique effects applied to them, like a hat with a fire effect on it, or sunglasses that sparkle. These items can be bought and sold on the Steam Marketplace. Valve, who owns Steam, takes a cut of the money every time an item is sold, meaning they are effectively triple dipping, once on the case, once on the key, and potentially infinite times when the item is sold on the marketplace. While it is easy to sit here and go on about how morally abhorrent this whole system is, the fact remains that these items are a core part of the identity of TF2. People want to give their characters wacky hats, or have a special gun with a lightning effect on it. Being able to express your individuality within the game is something fundamental to the culture and the game would be fundamentally lesser without it.
Personal Thoughts
Overall, this game truly is unique. It's not just a team game with a high skill ceiling, it's not just the goofy silly game where you can make a 32 person conga line, it's not just a complex marketplace where you can either win big or go broke, it's all of these things at once. You can not only tailor the game to your preferences in terms of how you want to play, but what you want to play as well. Some days I want to feel like a pro, outplaying everyone and being the top player on the team, while other times I just want to sit back and relax with my friends spamming taunts and putting ourselves into the funniest situations we can come up with. It's nice to have that level of variety in a game, to be able to adapt the game itself to your mood. Sometimes it can be hard to decide what you want to play, we live in an era where we have thousands of choices to pick from. TF2 is the comfort choice for many players, which now includes myself, for being able to be almost anything to anyone and do it well. TF2 is a fun game, and you should give it a try.