Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is the sequel to the game that put class-based, multiplayer team warfare on the map. This year's most anticipated online action game, TF2 delivers new gametypes, a signature art style powered by Valve's next generation animation technology, persistent player statistics, and more.
Team Fortress 2's graphical style is instantly recognizable and stands out very well among other First-Person Shooters, which usually tend to have a realistic or sci-fi feel to them. Looming in the scenery and design of the structures on each map, there's usually some kind of weapon, like a huge laser cannon on the top of the final capture area in Gravel Pit, or nuclear silos on Granary, which the two teams are apparently fighting over. There's a great amount of detail in these maps, which have a sort of industrial/mining setting to them, with boxes, tires, and planks of wood strewn about. Each of the maps is pretty distinct and has its own flavor, whether it's the urban, "street"-like final part of Dustbowl, the rocky Gravel Pit with its wooden structures, or the dam-like Hydro. Both of the teams in TF2 have their own theme; the darker reds and browns of Reliable Excavation and Demolition (RED), with their more rustic, wooden structures and areas, and the Builders League United (BLU) uses more stone and metal for their architecture. The maps aren't the really memorable part of the graphics and whole theme of the game, though, as the design of each of the nine character classes is where the graphics really shine. The characters have a unique, almost Disney-like cartoon (think The Incredibles) design to them, with the massive, hulking Heavy being easily distinguishable from the thin pinstripe suit-clad, cigarette smoking Spy. This has a practical gameplay element to it too; you're going to know that thin guy on the enemy team with the sunglasses and hat who always hangs back from the action is a sniper without needing anyone to tell you, and when you see a goggled, hardhat-wearing Engineer, you know to expect a sentry gun around to make your life more difficult. All of the classes have their own special taunts that can be triggered by a key press, like the Demoman pulling out his whiskey bottle and taking a swig, or the Pyro's awesome air guitar or Hadoken taunts. The game looks very, very cool and you can tell Valve put a lot of care and effort into the aesthetic design.
The music, while composed pretty much of short tunes that play when you first load up the game, is pretty cool and fitting stuff. It sounds like it could be from a 1960s spy movie or something similar to that, and goes very well with the silly, over-the-top nature of the rest of the game. Despite the four or so songs being around a minute long each, they're pretty memorable. The voice acting's great, with a bunch of humorous dialogue for each character. All of the classes have their own unique lines, and different voice commands such as calling for a healer, alerting the rest of the team to a spy sneaking up on you, to flank the enemies from a certain side, or many other things. There's also a great deal of situation-specific dialogue, like the Scout's taunts of "Eat it, fatty!" after you whack a Heavy's head in with a baseball bat, which makes you want to charge that huge Russian guy with the bullet-spitting machine of death head-on. That's not even mentioning the taunts, which are on a whole new level.
What makes the gameplay of Team Fortress stand out is its class system. You have nine different classes to play as, each with their own specific role and advantages and disadvantages, so proper class choices is important if you want to win. Strategies are also completely different with each class. As a Scout, you want to hit and run, getting in close for maximum damage with each of your scattergun shots, then use your speed and double jumping to get away before the other guy knows what hit him and blows you away, which is easy due to low HP. A Spy player's strategy, though, involves using his cloaking and disguise instead of pure agility, which he lacks, to infiltrate the enemy group and score some instant-kill backstabs and sabotage their equipment. Yet again, the Demoman's different from those two, being more of a defender and setting up traps with his grenades to blow up any enemy that tries to get past him. Engineers want to support their team by building teleporters to get teammates to the front lines quicker and defend key points with their sentry guns, and so on.
There are only two game types, but they're fun enough to keep you playing for months. Capture the Flag works just like every other CTF mode, except to fit with the whole secret-agent/evil genius theme of the game, you're capturing the other team's intelligence briefcase instead. Control Point isn't as common as capture the flag in other FPS games, but only two out of the seven official maps support CTF, so Control Point is the dominant game type. Control Point involves capturing certain points marked on the level, which one team needs to capture by having members on for a certain amount of time, and more teammates on the point gives a boost in capture speed, while an enemy on the point makes the capture timer freeze. In a match on Control Point, there are three different set-ups: the BLU team attacks and RED team has to defend for a certain amount of time, which increases each time BLU takes a point, with subsequent points unlocking on each capture. On some user-created maps and Dustbowl, this extends over a series of multiple maps. On TC maps, the only user-created one being Hydro, there are multiple sections to the map, but each team is on offense and has to capture the point within the time limit. Each point captured by one team brings them closer to the other's base. Other ones, like Granary and Well, have each team attacking and trying to hold all the points, which go in a linear fashion from one team's base to the other, but only the most recently captured point can be recaptured by the defenders to try to push back.