Team Fortress Arcade

I recently came across a little game called Team Fortress Arcade, as you may well have guessed it is based off of a well known Valve title we know and love under the name of Team Fortress. The game itself is actually a old school side scrolling beat um up type game like Final Fight or Streets of Rage. I guess it's more shoot um up than beat um up but never the less, you get to play through 9 different levels as one of the 9 different characters from the Team Fortress series with up to 3 other people playing with you. They have tried to get the characters as close to their Team Fortress counter parts, with them all having the correct health, speed and weapons.

Each playable class has different attacks which I am stealing straight out of the read me file for the game just so you get an idea of what each character can do in this game and here we are:

Scout: Can double jump by pressing "jump" again when in the air.
Soldier: Can rocket jump if you press "attack" right after pressing "jump."
Pyro: Flamethrower and flare gun do after burn damage to enemies.
Demoman: Fires sticky bombs at the ground when you press "attack" in the air.
Jump again to ignite them.  You can sticky jump by being on top of the sticky
bombs when you jump.
Engineer: Hit your sentry once to make it a level 2 sentry.
Hit it again to make it level 3.
Medic: you can control the height of your jump by holding down the "jump" button
longer.
Sniper: Hold your "attack" button to charge your sniper rifle.  A fully charged
shot blows through multiple enemies.
Spy: Hold the "attack" button to cloak and become invisible to on-screen enemies.

At the moment the game does not include online multi player, which would be a nice touch as at the moment controls for all 4 players are spread out on a single keyboard and I have not worked out how to change them yet due to a lack of options in game. You could easily get a couple people playing quite happily with one using the wasd controls and another using the numpad, but you would be hard pushed to get 4 people comfortable while playing this game. At the moment I had no one about to play this with at the time of writing this so I gave the game a go on single player. I have tried out a few different characters as it gives you a chance to choose and or change which class you want to play as. Classes such as Pyro, Heavy and Soldier you can quite happily play the game solo, but some other ones such as Sniper or Engineer were really quite difficult to play this by your self with and would be much better suited to multi player. You will also see some familiar aspects of game as well such as payload and command points levels implemented in to the game which is pretty cool. I kept dying on the payload race level, I think it was level 4 but don't quote me on that, while I'm on the topic of dying, when you do all that happens is you get a continue countdown in the corner, and this feature is unlimited, so as long as you keep continuing you can die as many times as you want. I like to think of it as the respawn system that Team Fortress has.

It's a fun little game and takes next to no time at all to download, so if you have a spare 10-20 minutes and want something to do, I suggest giving this a wee download and try it out.