![]() ![]() He draws his bonesaw, you draw your butterfly knife, and the duel commences. So the two of you run in circles trying to get behind each other, until the Medic realises - with an almost visible pang of horror - who you really are. The Medic, meanwhile, should always stay behind a Heavy for protection while he heals. The Spy, you see, needs to get behind his victim for a one-hit-kill backstab. It also means you get healed by enemy Medics - a peculiar sensation - and that can lead to an utterly bizarre psychological dance. We like to dress up as a Heavy, because his reassuringly enormous size makes it hard for anyone to believe he could be a slinky Spy in disguise. If you can stay away from your namesake and take the Spy hunter's check-shots unflinchingly, the challenge becomes to act like an enemy. ![]() Realising they must be an enemy Spy, you declare to your team that "The Spy's a Soldier!" Whereupon, of course, everyone empties their magazines into you. That means that every now and then, you experience the alarming existential crisis of encountering someone with your own name. The Spy's disguise-o-meter, built into his cigarette case, will give him the name of an enemy who really is the class he's pretending to be. That gives rise to a hilarious mindgame: a good Spy will take a near-lethal shotgun blast to the face from a supposed friend without flinching, confront his attacker toe-to-toe as if to say "What?," and continue his infiltration beyond suspicion. There's no friendly fire in TF2, but shooting all your teammates to uncover Spies wastes too much time and ammo to be practical.Īs a Spy in disguise you still take damage from enemies, but you're man enough not to show it - you don't bleed. He can disguise himself impeccably as any class of enemy, and now he can also render himself temporarily invisible to slip into their base. He was always Team Fortress's most inventive class, but his new incarnation is even more extraordinary. Mind you, a minimap would make the Spy's life harder. The others are mostly a linear series of control points - all except Gravelpit, which gives attackers a choice of two to assault, and 2Fort, which remains stubbornly Capture The Flag. Hydro, a control-point map split into six zones, restructures itself between rounds to put teams into one of 16 different configurations. The roster doesn't feel slim once you play them. TF2 comes with six maps three are new, three are remakes. It's a long-needed outlet for our natural tendency to pre-game smack talk, and it makes the atmosphere of the calm before the storm electric. The result is two rows of people jeering, singing, laughing, braying, dancing and whooping at each other in a cacophony of clashing voices. Most maps kick off with the two teams separated by a metal mesh that lifts after a minute, giving Engineers time to build their defences and everyone else a chance to taunt each other. If you leave the taunt and chat commands alone, you'll only really hear yourself if you're a Heavy: the big guy can't resist cackling deliriously if you're getting a lot of kills, and an extraordinary spree will usually be punctuated with a bellowing "SO. We've seen chain-reactions of death where a Sniper waves to his unfortunate victim, is shot dead mid-mock by another, who then performs the same taunt - with the same fatal result.īut the idea that your character is a character, with his own personality, is only as relevant as you make it. You've actually got to make a strategic decision about whether you've got a few seconds to play air guitar on your victim's carcass or not. So as well as making that mockery more crushing, they've also made a game of it: taunting now roots you to the spot, pulls you out into third-person view to watch yourself swagger, leaving you utterly helpless. Valve know we like to mock the dead, dance on graves, hump corpses. They were already funny, but TF2 just brings it out beautifully, every round. ![]() Character is a catalyst for comedy, and until now multiplayer games just haven't had it. But it only really gets a belly-laugh when the Scout is a scampering stick-boy in knee-high socks, and his victim a meat-headed brickheap of a man. The image of a Scout circle-strafing a Heavy quickly enough to smack him into a stupor with a tiny baseball bat is inherently funny. But it's what lies at the heart of multiplayer gaming that matters most, and that is, in the parlance of our times, the LOLs. Cooperation means more, victory is sweeter, betrayal is more bitter, defeat more humiliating. That's Team Fortress 2: multiplayer magnified. ![]()
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