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Fortress Forever: First Impressions
Posted 15th September 2007 at 12:53am by M1ke, tagged as Games, Review | Commenting Closed

Today a mod that I've been waiting a couple of years for has finally been released. Fortress Forever is the Source mod that attempts to replicate Team Fortress Classic, a mod for the original Half-Life released with a patch 7/8 years ago. It was a mod that never had the massive fanbase of Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat, but nevertheless it was a brilliant mod, and a large, dedicated fanbase built up around it. Some of its maps became iconic for the clever design, even if few gamers ever actually played them. It mattered not, TFC did things its own way, with a sniper rifle that took some skill in finding a good spot and waiting until the right time, rather than just strafing left and right and hoping your ping beats theirs ala Counter-Strike. Tactical use of grenades due to the fact that you could hold down a button to throw them whilst still using other weapons, and even time their detonation by waiting to throw (an idea first replicated by Halo 3 years later). It also deviated from the standard CTF of most team games, with progressive assault maps, tug of war maps and even VIP escort maps - all before most mainstream games had come up with them. TFC is such that it's still great fun today, especially as its running on an old engine means it's virtually lagless over broadband. What of it's modern day remake then?

I was quite pleased upon loading that there were already over 200 servers up - pretty impressive for a mod that hasn't been out a day. Obviously the entire TFC community has been watching for it (even though the "official" sequel TF2 is being released in beta by Valve on Monday) and it shows in the numbers. I saw Jolt were running a 24/7 Dustbowl (an assault map) server so I jumped in. It took quite a while to load the map, but the loading screen had an over-head view and an explanation of the objectives, handy for new players. Once in the buttons for teams are big and obvious, and each shows the team's score and number of players. On the class screen you can see a description of each of the 9 classes skills and what they look like before picking one. You spawn immediately and can set out doing whatever you're team is meant to. I began as a sniper, and found the sniping mechanics to be very similar, apart from a little bar under the cross-hair which makes it easier to tell when the rifle is charged. I won't describe every movement, but once the game started and I started shooting it felt like everything was all second nature. The maps look excellent as far as recreations go, with all the random faceless buildings and tunnels of old decorated and painted and generally made to look like a real place. There are a couple of texture details in the map, but nothing that puts one off the gameplay itself. It's the gameplay where FF still has that TFC shine - the grenade tactics are there, with a handy progress bar for timing the perfect shot, the health and ammo readouts are obvious but don't get in the way, and your "Fortress Point" score is shown permenantly at the top of the screen. The points system is good, as rather than just award one point for a kill and 10 for a flag capture, it awards varying points for all kinds of things, and still records kills and deaths seperately. Even something as simple as an engineer repairing a team-mate's sentry gun nets 6 points - not much compared to the 100 for a kill, but a nice way of encouraging more teamwork than just all shooting the enemy.

A complaint would be that a few of the weapons don't quite feel right - especially the sniper's auto-rifle which doesn't actually show any sign of being fired other than a faint noise. Similarly the Heavy-Weapons Guy's cannon is nice and powerful (with a new overheating feature to prevent them hosing an area for too long) but sounds a bit weak. Admittedly it probably sounds like a real mini-gun, but the roar of the old cannon does feel missed. The engineer has a much easier time building turrets, as they can be selected and "ghosted" in front of you before building, which also shows a handy progress bar. An even better feature is the pie menu that makes up an engineer's "special" ability. Using this the engineer can re-target his gun, and detonate or dismantle guns and ammo dispensers by clicking once and moving the mouse - very flash.

Overall the game felt very fun to play, and with more people jumping on and more servers starting it will only get better. They might all run away to TF2 when it hits but I reckon this will be a more faithful reincarnation of TFC - TF2 is afterall a sequel and as well as changing the graphics style I'm sure the gameplay will feel different as well (I've not yet seen any evidence of the tactical grenades, for example). Regardless my point is that there's hopefully room for both games to co-exist, because after spending just a few hours playing only three of the classes on a single map I already like FF a lot, and want time to come to love it. If you own Half-Life 2, go and get yourself this mod now.

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