After playing for a couple hours and having to get used to the quirks of the game, I'd say I'm atleast half-decent at it! It took me quite a many tries on many different servers, but I finally completeed all the easiest missions. It took forever just to get a canteen, an item that expands your options in the game to also allow you to use one-use consumable items you can buy. You'd think it'd be a given, but nope you have to earn this shit, and I'm still cool with that.
I haven't tried all the classes yet, infact I've yet to even touch the Demoman or the Sniper, but I think I can safely say that my two favorite classes will be the Scout and the Spy. I don't even have to pick favorites between those two, because their strategic niches are mutually exclusive from one another! If the situation calls for one, I'll never be using the other.
I liked the Scout because he's a little man that's actually an indestructible powerhouse given the correct circumstances. On my first time using the scout, I go "oh, what the hell" and max out the upgrades his little baseball bat weapon, and boy can he swing that thing fucking fast. Fast enough that it's competing with any other weapon I have personally witnessed thus far for raw DPS. I just jump into the pitch of combat and just start swinging like mad and then magic happens and everything else is dead. Better yet, while he only has 125 hp, which puts him right next to the spy when it comes to paper thin fragility, he gains health from picking up money as an intrinsic trait. Now if this simply restored him to 125, that'd be weak, but what it DOES do is it overheals him, or heals him for more than his maximum. The Medic can do this to people, but he has a limit of about 150% or 200% health depending on if he's nice enough to use his precious money to put points into that particular branch of his skillset. However, with the Scout, there doesn't seem to be ANY LIMIT WHATSOEVER to how much health he can have. In the thick of a fight, he's swinging and killing and vacuuming cash up and healing himself for far more than the enemy can hope to damage him, and I leave the fight at 600 health easily, and that's absurd. Oh, and he also intrinsically has a larger radius to pick up cash than everyone else, so not only is the cash healing him, but he's drawing it towards himself like a kleptomaniac money magnet with a drug problem; and everyone appreciates you doing it because money pickups are shared with the whole team, and that's awesome.
And I like the spy because it falls into the special category of fun that basically boils down to "Being a douchebag to the AI". While I need a little refinement on my technqiue because I'm dying all the time, like literally the moment my disguise is blown my 125 hp disappears like it was never there in the first place, there's very little room for error but I can appreciate that when the Spy can do things that no other class can do. Though dying itself is not a big deal since I'm only ever using the spy to get rid of snipers when they fly out the gate and to get rid of ubercharging medics, which are little unicycle monkeys that follow around giant enemies in order to make them invincible so they can just stroll straight to the finish line and they're hard to get rid of because they make themselves invincible too. If I can just get rid of those two things then the whole team benefits from not having to deal with them the hard way. Even though my set goal is very simple, I like the spy because it requires a fair bit more planning and decision-making skill, and while dealing significant blows to the enemy forces is possible, doing it and walking away in one piece to do it again is a gratifying task when more often than not it turns into a suicide mission. I just wish the spy could take a hit, a single hit, so the moment my cover is blown it doesn't just take a single robo soldier to instantly spin on his heel, shoot a rocket into my face for lethal damage before I can even react, and then turn back around and keep going where he was going before the kill cam can even catch him looking in my direction. If the enemies weren't literal robots in the scenario the game is laying out, I'd call bullshit on their inhumanly fast reflexes and aiming skills.
Though while I'm enjoying it,
thoroughly and deeply enjoying it, I'm often having to deal with other players getting frustrated and dropping out of the game so we're left with a smaller team until more people jump in to replace them. Unfortunately, the difficulty of the game doesn't scale to number of players, the game just expects you to have the full party of six, and if you don't? Too bad! Though that's one thing I think could be improved, so the game isn't so mercilessly brutal to smaller teams of people cause hey, people just have to jump out sometimes.
One other thing that's really obvious is that you NEED money in order to put points into your class' skill upgrades, however, while you CAN change classes inbetween waves, you're strongly discouraged from doing so because if you've been using the same class for a few waves now you've probably already invested quite alot of cash into it, and changing to a different class will leave you with only however much money you had left, and all the upgrades were tied to that class so now you're back to square one when the game is ruthlessly ramping up the difficulty every second, so doing so is practically suicide, not only for you, but for your whole team as well. It'd be more fair if there were a separate but equal amounts of cash for each of any given class of yours to use, or atleast the ability to sell your upgrades, even if it's at a loss, because as it currently is, it's you buy it and I hope you have no regrets because it's stuck with you until the end of match.
Oddly enough, the game is forgiving to players that jump in in later rounds, giving them the big lump sum of cash that's been accumulated thus far for each other teammate, and allowing them to just spend it however they choose on whatever class. I'm sure this'll eventually become some kind of exploit to gain an advantage on the AI after people form cohesive enough teams and servers to take advantage of it.
It's frustrating even to very experienced players, as I found out when I was randomly dropped into an advanced players server and I then get the pleasure of watching them get steamrolled over and over and over again by the very last wave of a particular mission, for two hours straight, because the builds they had were highly specialized to handle the beginning portions of the match, but now they can't adapt to handle the latter portions and they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. They were so close to the finish, but it was just laughing in their face and there was nothing they could do about it. I mean, *I* was still having fun, but everyone else got so frustrated they all quit at basically the same time, leaving me all alone.
One last thing, I do really, really, really enjoy the fact that the game just gives you new weapons and toys to play with randomly. It's like just "Hey, thanks for playing, here's an extra little gift. Hope you enjoy it". I mean, it's such an obvious ploy to get people to continue playing the game, keep them coming back and hoping for arbitrarily distributed rewards, but the way I see it, the game is already very fun, and giving the players free things to make it more fun every now and then, no strings attached, is just the special cherry on top. I really really like that.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 14528663 times)