The Orange Box: Team Fortress 2 (PC)

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It's next to impossible to stand out as an online team-based shooter these days. The genre that started with Team Fortress and Tribes has come a long way, and everyone and his uncle has made one. It doesn't help that so many of them are good, from EA's successful Battlefield series to the recent Quake Wars to the PlayStation 3 sleeper Warhawk. Valve's approach is to come at the genre with style. While Team Fortress 2 was still in development, Valve released short films highlighting the different classes. They were funny and full of personality. And they probably had no more to do with Team Fortress 2 than those ads of an old man in a museum had to do with Halo 3. Or so a cynical fella might think.

He couldn't be more wrong. It's no small feat that this humor and personality oozes from the game, even when you're just frantically running and shooting and spawning and strafing and hollering for a medic and capturing control points and -- oh, look, you just got hit by a train. Team Fortress 2 is brought to life with a glorious combination of artwork, sound, musical riffs, writing and little touches like the way you're given a freeze-frame of the instant of your death, complete with an opportunity to save a screenshot. The fact that Valve knows you might want to save a screenshot at that moment speaks volumes. This is a game with style -- sly style, in spades -- and unlike anything else you've played.

The visuals, for instance, situate Team Fortress 2 in a cartoon world, with stylized characters who wouldn't look out of place in 'The Incredibles.' But whereas "cartoony" is often synonymous with chintzy, there's nothing chintzy about these graphics. They use the Source engine to its fullest extent and feature some of the most expressive animation you'll find this side of motion capturing. This game is a real looker, partly because it looks so good, but mostly because it looks unique.

Not that there isn't also gameplay here. There is. Smooth as ice cream gameplay. Jump in as one of the more accessible classes and you'll be having a blast with your team in no time. Each class has only a single main weapon, and there's no messy alternate fire or inventory. Any given class does one thing, and one thing only, and you're pretty much just pointing and shooting. There are only six maps, each of which plays as either capture-the-flag or across a series of control points. It all seems so simple. Team Fortress 2 is unapologetically approachable, a real looker who's also got the social skills to introduce herself to a stranger.

The maps are simple, because geography isn't the point here (see a game like Quake Wars for an example of the map being a prominent part of the gameplay). Instead, the point is the interplay of the classes, each doing their one thing. And this is where Team Fortress 2 has real legs. For instance, the scout is incredibly fast, but frail. The heavy is incredibly slow, but sturdy. A comparison of these guys reflects the game's design philosophy in a nutshell. Everyone has an extreme strength and an extreme weakness. The scout can be easily dispatched with a shot or two from any gun, but you have to catch him first. And you can come up behind a heavy and whale away on him before he can even turn around, but he'll be able to weather the damage.