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Sunday 13 January, 2008
GAMEPLAY
During the second session of playing Team Fortress 2, I experimented with other classes that I didn't play with as much. For the most part I really enjoyed playing as every class, in particular the scout and demoman. The scout was a unique experience because of the speed of the character. Playing as a scout is more similar to playing other fast paced shooters such as Unreal Tournament and Quake. The ability to double jump is very useful in disorienting opposing players and make traversing the levels much easier.
When I began playing as the demoman, I realized that I would need to change how I played completely. The sticky bomb launcher, which is basically a remote mine, requires strategic placing and good timing. The standard grenade launcher also requires accuracy to hit enemy players. Compared to the scout where running up close to the enemies for maximum effectiveness of the scattergun, the demoman is better for staying further back and taking out enemies from a longer distance.
DESIGN
The more I played, the more I got frustrated by critical hits from enemies. The game has a system implemented where any attack has a chance of being a critical hit that does an insane amount of damage, especially the soldier and heavy classes. A critical rocket from a soldier has the ability to kill every class in one hit except for a heavy or another soldier. Since rockets are long range weapons, they can be shot from a long distance and be devastating. I have found myself exploding from critical rockets from players with minimal amounts of health that just happened to turn around at the wrong time.
The level design in the game is a bit repetitive with all official maps having the same industrial rural theme. Despite this, all of the maps are well balanced and keep things entertaining. Valve has also released the source SDK so that people can create their own maps for the various gametypes. The constant flow of newly created maps, both well made and poorly designed ones, keep the game from getting old and repetetive.
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