Posted: 20-09-07 In: Reviews By: Chris_D | (0) comments | Add your comments

To the modern FPS gamer, whose idea of a great multiplayer experience is wedging their character between a high-definition bump-mapped muddy floor and a wall of realistic anti-aliased sandbags as bullets fly past, Team Fortress must sound like a homosexual intercourse innuendo. “I squeezed in through the back entrance before unleashing all of my firepower on his sorry ass!” “I was right on him, charging up my shot, but he was going too fast and I fired my load too soon!” “This big, burly engineer jumped on me and whipped out his wrench!”

Little do they know, the original Team Fortress (TF) and the Valve-acquired Team Fortress Classic (TFC) largely inspired many of the realistic, team-based games we play today. Battlefield 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars can both trace their heritage all the way back to these games, which introduced us to the perverse concept of stealing enemy flags and multiple team classes. This classic gameplay is what Fortress Forever, the latest Half-Life 2 mod, is trying to keep alive by upgrading TFC to the Source engine.

So the relationship between the Team Fortress games should look something like this horizontal family tree:


Don’t ask me how Heavy Weapon Guys managed to forge a family within a male-orientated fighting force. Suddenly the aforementioned innuendos seem so much more appropriate…

Ahem. Fortress Forever isn’t a straight port of TFC, however. The gameplay is slightly faster paced in a nod to the original Quake mod, and certain classes have been tweaked (most notably, the engineer’s teleports have been axed). All nine classes remain; the soldier, HWG and demoman are the hard hitters, while the engineer, pyro and sniper are best suited for defence and the spy and scout are ideal infiltrators. In practice it’s much more complex, as they all have multiple roles – if you don’t already know about them it would be best to check out the TFC Wikipedia page. In essence, this mod is trying to preserve the sacred gameplay of TFC before Valve’s soon-to-be-released TF2 comes along and messes everything up for the old gaming veterans. It’s important, therefore, not to compare Fortress Forever to TF2 – as they are both trying to be very different games. The former is firmly rooted in the past, whilst the latter looks to the future.

While “Capture The Flag” is the main game mode, Fortress Forever also inherits a number of attack-and-defend maps from its predecessor, where the team on offence must penetrate the enemy base and plunge their erect flag into the capture point. This must be repeated multiple times to render the enemy sore and defeated. What? Stop giving me that look. If that doesn’t stimulate your (seriously, stop it) interest, There are a few extra map types including a “hunted-style” escort mission (which involves Winston Churchill and florescent yellow assassins). Maps are painstakingly faithful to their TFC counterparts, and there are a total of 20 included in this build. So, time to crack out the Red Bull and unplug the phone? Not quite. While the eleven CTF maps are joyful in their simplicity, the others often feel stale and dated. For instance, while Dustbowl is a classic map, traversing its linear pathways and constantly getting gibbed by grenade spam doesn’t quite feel the same when you’ve parachuted behind enemy lines from your friend’s helicopter in Battlefield 2. This is not to say that Fortress Forever is obsolete – just that newer players may fail to appreciate it.

Visually, Fortress Forever is part of the plethora of realistic-looking Source mods that are plastered in high-res textures in an attempt to be “cool” and “sophisticated”. While most mods can get away with this, FF doesn’t quite pull it off. Sure, if you browse through their media library the models, weapons and maps look great individually. Professional, even. But when you’re in the thick of battle and you see a perfectly-proportioned military soldier flung fifty feet into the air by a rocket launcher, only to fall on the roof of a wild-west saloon and carry on shooting, your eyebrow may raise quizzically. Unless you can’t move your eyebrows individually, in which case you may stroke your chin instead. What I’m trying to say is that there isn’t any overall art direction – the characters are rehashes of the uninspired TFC originals, and lack diversity. There isn’t much to distinguish a spy from a soldier if they’re more than a few metres away, and on certain models it can even be quite hard to tell what team they’re on. It’s also reasonable to wonder why such a light-hearted, unrealistic game has such gritty graphics – bases are covered in a layer of dirt and grime, while weapons look as if they could be found in a real American gun store. Not to mention that many of the maps feel completely out of place – Cornfield takes place in City 17, Citadel and all, while Monkey is positioned within some disused jungle ruins. The only time when the game looks right is on the generic-looking grey maps, because the generic-looking classes fit right in.

Now let’s talk about feeling. Not the kind of feeling that goes on when two heavy weapons guys get locked in a hotel room together, but the way the game plays. Before I go into criticism mode, I want to state very clearly: FORTRESS FOREVER PLAYS WONDERFULLY. There are barely any glitches, the game runs as smoothly as a Valve game and everything is polished so well you can see your enemies die twice; once for real, and once in this shiny game’s reflection. Inevitably however, it isn’t perfect. Many of the weapons feel weak and unsatisfying. Sure, the nailgun is supposed to feel like you’re sprinkling household tools from a tube, but the sniper rifle? The pathetic sound effect and significant lack of recoil makes it seem like a scoped pistol. With the notable exceptions of the HWG’s minigun and the super shotgun, this applies to pretty much all of the weapons in the game. The normal shotgun doesn’t even have a reload animation. Seeing as modellers and texturers have put a huge amount of effort into making these guns, you’d expect them to be given an equal amount of attention when they’re sewn into the game. Though, to be fair, part of the problem is the Source engine itself. It’s no coincidence that the majority of Half-Life 2 mods end up with weapons which seem surprisingly similar to the infamous HL2 SMG, which undoubtedly fires paperclips. The Source engine may also intimidate TFC veterans – Fortress Forever will never feel identical to TFC so long as the physics, movement and effects are all dictated by Half-Life 1’s hip new younger brother. I can’t help but wonder whether Fortress Forever would be better suited to one of the Unreal engines.

Fortress Forever is a brilliantly made, well polished Half-Life 2 modification. However, part of the reason why this review has been so overbearingly negative is because at this moment in time, Fortress Forever needs to be a godsend. With veterans stubbornly sticking to TFC, and new players inevitably drawn to TF2, you have to wonder if there’s any room for Fortress Forever. Were there no competing Team Fortress games I would slap a 9/10 sticker on this mod and move on, but in the current context that wouldn’t be particularly helpful. Instead, I’ll say this. If you’ve played TFC and you like bunnyhopping and grenade spamming, try Fortress Forever out. See if you like it. You might be pleasantly surprised, but don’t expect to delete good ol’ TFC from your Steam list just yet. On the other hand, if you’re new to the world of Team Fortress, just buy the Orange Box. Having played in the beta I can tell you that Team Fortress 2 is a bloody brilliant game, and as long as you’re not interested in training in the ancient oriental art of jumping like a rabbit (I’m sure most people reading this review don’t even know what I mean by that), then TF2 is a far superior game to both Team Fortress Classic and Fortress Forever.