You can check out the entire review here. It's a 9/10, by the way.
Here's a few interesting excerpts:
Making a complicated team-based online FPS like Team Fortress into an accessible experience was obviously one of Valve's objectives. Each map comes with a short video that tells you about the game-type and goals; all the level architecture is distinct when you move between sections, with big sign-posts telling you which capture-point or area you're heading to; and all the weapons and abilities are really intuitive, like the Medic's healing gun, which fires health into your target and illustrates this by pumping little red crosses along the stream.
Engineers are particularly susceptible to Spies, though, because they're often kneeling down and working on something. And Spies are drawn to their location, because Spies can also undo entrenched sentry guns, sabotaging them at the potential cost of exposure. That relationship is typical. Each cIass is a cunning set of contradictions. It's not so much rock, paper, scissors as rock, paper, scissors, flick-knife, fire, sentry-gun, mini-gun, sniper rifle, double-jump, bone-saw.
In contrast with other, less accessible team-based FPS games, TF2's clever concoction of cIasses, artistic choices and relationship trackers help you establish effective attack and defence routines almost without the need for voice communication (although it, and finger-bending voice-command menus, are present). The good thing about that instinctive adaptation is that it allows you to slot onto public servers without feeling self-conscious, but the further you progress the more likely you are to experiment with tougher cIass, and the more strategic depth you uncover. The victor, in every situation, is simply the team who adapted best first. Where we perhaps expected baffling complexity, instead we've got a game that rewards mental agility, but doesn't struggle to cultivate it.
In an uncharacteristic burst of intelligent observation, the game's Wikipedia entry remarks that the old design of TF2 is "quite possibly the only game to have spawned a thriving sub-genre without ever being released itself". For the people who make up that sub-genre, as well as those addressing it afresh, we're confident the reaction will be "ten years well spent".
Sounds great to me. I'm not a big multiplayer guy, but I'll definitely check out Team Fortress 2. I love how its complex yet accessible - unlike most cIass-based online FPS. It's also interesting how Eurogamer reviewed Team Fortress 2 seperately from The Orange Box, I guess they'll do the same with Episode Two and Portal.
Your thoughts?
Kitty is not amused...
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