Team Fortress Is Free. Yay.

When a few seconds into my first game of Team Fortress 2 in nearly two years, I was killed by a scout wearing a top-hat and wielding a fish, you can surely forgive me for wondering which new strain of class A hallucinogenic Valve had been taking prior to their decision to release the game as free to play. Then, when a maniacally cackling pyro with a rubber glove stretched over his gimp mask ran past, waving an axe wrapped in barbed wire; I started wishing all the developers were taking it.

For a well-balanced and competitive multiplayer fps; Team Fortress was completely bonkers the first time round, only now, like a sexually deviant granny, we get it free of charge and with an abundance of hats. Clearly Valve have realised that their sales of the game had plateaued and have quite sensibly decided to open their gates so that the masses can flood inwards in a frenzied spree of micro-transacting and hat wearing.  

You heard it right - micro-transactions – say it again without choking. To be fair, any which can be deemed game changing are extremely cheap; allowing you to bag most of the important ones together for under a tenner, if not less if you only play a few classes. If you have the patience, you can just play the game without them and wait for them to gradually unlock over time, which they do. You need a premium account for this though; you can get one by either being someone who has already bought the game prior to the changes or by buying one item. Given that the cheapest of them are below 30p this isn’t the end of the world.

Valve have also streamlined the game-finding process (without illiminating the ability to manually search for a server) and gone to great lengths to improve the amount of information on offer to a new player in the form of tutorials for each class. These are basic at best, but provide a vital staging area for new-comers to grasp the basics before getting involved in the game proper. There really couldn’t be a better time to get started.