[Guitar Woman]

Monday Night Combat!

Short version: Team Fortress 3 came out early, and it is really fucking good.

Long version. From the screenshots and preview videos I assumed it'd be nothing more than a less-inspired TF2 equivalent for console tards, who will never have the updated version of TF2 available, and I would have been reasonably satisfied with that, if a little copycat-wary. Instead, the developers basically took all the stuff that makes TF2 great, boiled it down to essentials, and built a completely different gameplay experience around those core concepts. Specifically, a bizarre hybrid of team deathmatch and tower defense. And it is awesome. It looks fucking great, too, the entire thing has a fantastic visual flow that I'm having a difficult time putting into words. Probably because I'm an impoverished Wii owner unused to fancy graffix, and because I decided the best way to experience this title for the first time was underwater-stoned.

I am told it bears similarities to something dubbed "Defense of the Ancients," but I wouldn't know, because that's an RTS thing, and I don't play RTSs. I mean, I have a penis and all.

My favorite classes to play are probably Support and Assassin, although I concede that Assassin is one of the easiest roles in the game to fill, partially due to how it can attack while still invisible (which is kinda necessary since you can see behind you and all), and partially because you can get instant kills on anything but Tanks if you spend your money right early on. A Gray Level 3 Assassin is the best thing for taking down Jackbots, no question. Not to mention that, with all the kills you rack up after maxing out your attack power, buying into maxouts for every other skill doesn't take very long. And that's not even getting into the abuse potential for her smokebomb-jump thing, which I have only begun to wrap my head around. I wouldn't mind a nerf for these guys, but I'm not really qualified to think about that since I know how less than half of the game works.

The only real problems I can see at this point are that every map basically looks the same, and the one thing they ripped off wholesale from TF2, every class having a distinct look and personality, falls kinda flat, because they don't talk as much and aren't incredibly endearing (except the announcer, who is a complete asshole and is hilarious). The silhouette thing works about as well as it does in TF2, you can basically always tell what you're up against just by taking a quick look around.

If you can run this game, at all, buy it immediately, because it is gooder than hell.