Spy - This is the class for all you World of Warcraft rogues out there who are terrified of fighting face-to-face. The Spy’s greatest talent is the ability to disguise himself as any class from the opposing team. When the Spy is disguised, he’ll look normal to his teammates but he’ll be wearing a paper mask of whatever class he’s imitating. The other team will only see the class he’s imitating. The Spy carries a revolver, an electro-sapper for taking out enemy turrets and dispensers without dropping his disguise, a butterfly knife to instant-kill anyone from behind and the disguise kit. The Spy can also turn invisible for a brief amount of time, making it easy to sneak around the map.

The key with the Spy is to look like you’re coming out of the back of the enemy base and to not be seen running out of your own area. I had the most luck with an Engineer or Sniper disguise. I would sneak over to the enemy side of the map while cloaked before coming up behind people or taking down the turrets. The disguise will drop every time you attack anyone so you’ll have to be quick about putting it back on. I’m not normally a stealth guy, but the Spy was lots of fun and very rewarding.

Nine classes and each one completely distinct from the others. They are not only distinct but are also well-balanced so far. There are a couple tweaks here and there that would help but overall I haven’t seen anyone completely dominating with any one class. Having said that, it’s only been open to everyone for a very short time and people are still figuring out the maps, the classes and the tactics. I do think it’s a problem that the Medic can fill up his ubercharge on players that are already full on health but I’ve been abusing that myself so I can’t complain too much about it. All the maps are either capture-the-flag or a variation on the control-point system and most games I’ve been in have ended in a stalemate. Stalemates go another round into sudden death where no one can respawn and the winner is usually decided by who kills all of the enemy. Right now, TF2 plays more like team deathmatch than anything else but in time the players will start working on objectives.

Second only to the graphics is the game’s polish. It has many small details that make it a lot of fun and very accessible to first timers. Each map has a little intro movie that lays out the objectives and the loading screen reports your stats. It doesn’t have a kill-cam like Call of Duty but it does take a freeze frame of the guy who killed you. Keep that in mind when you score a kill because a well-timed taunt will have your victim staring at it for a few seconds. It’s not all shame in death, though. You’ll also get a little factoid called "on the bright side" that lists something good about what you just did, be it you topped your record on kills or lived the longest in that class. It takes some of the sting away from staring at the guy who just took you out, but only a little. It gets even better, though. If you get killed by the same guy over and over again, then that player is "dominating" you. It’ll even show up in the scrolling kill list like that. That guy is now your nemesis and gets a boxing gloves icon above his head until you can kill him. Killing a nemesis comes up as a revenge kill in the kill list. There are many others and they all add up to a very complete package.

He may be my new nemesis but at least I’m not on fire.

Now that it’s playable was it worth the wait? Probably not, but it’s not like we were sitting around for eight years with nothing to do. I’m not even sure you can call it "waiting." It’s a great multiplayer shooter, there’s no doubt about that; but it could never live up to the time it took to get here. The story of Team Fortress 2 was always, "why isn’t it out?" Now that it’s coming out, everyone needs to remember that it was never meant to be anything more than a shooter. It’d be great if this were Team Fortress 5 and we’d had some other entries in the series over the years but I buried my Team Fortress 2 hatchet long ago. I’m just glad it worked out the way it did. Is it greedy that I now want them to build a single-player game with these characters and these graphics?