Buildin’ a sentry!

As everybody who wasn’t living under wi-fi-less rock for the last few weeks is aware of, Valve rolled out the last class update for Team Fortress 2, finally giving the engineer some new toys. I’ve always loved that little rascal, and I was sort of scared of the changes that would be made. So far all seems fairly well-balanced. Here’s a rundown of the changes added last Thursday:

• All equipment can now be relocated with a mouse click
• New shotgun that stores revenge crits
• The Wrangler allows you to control sentry guns, adds a shield and longer firing distance
• Added the Gunslinger, a cyborg arm that lets you drop mini-sentries

Everybody and their TF2 playing uncle is playing as an engie now, which means I haven’t had a chance to do very much engineering. Someone has to attack the other team. But it does make for some interesting gameplay dynamics. The best part is being a spy. I’ve set so many personal records with that class, it’s hilarious. When the other team has eight engineers, none of whom know the first thing about being an engineer (especially the headphone-wearing Mac noobs), it’s frightfully easy to place 30+ sappers with one quick dash. As they all scramble to recover, you can scoot off for a clean spy cap to win the game. True story. Twice.

It’ll be difficult to accurately gauge how these changes will affect the game as a whole, and I’ve yet to try more than a few maps with the updates. The long-range sentry could be a real game changer, and it probably makes being an engineer a very different experience. Once things calm down, I’ll get back in the groove.

Fun fact: I wanted this post title to be “This is Sparta madness!”, but HTML elements and entry titles never get along well.