It's the next full project from Valve, the complete geniuses behind Half-Life. And it's going to be just as huge
Steve Owen

When the world announced that Valve's first title, Half-Life, was the greatest game ever made, the American developers just shrugged their shoulders and told us to wait and see what they had up their sleeves. The cuffs are undone, the shirts rolled to the elbows, and the work is Team Fortress 2, a massive leap forwards in the technology used in the free Half-Life add-on, Team Fortress Classic.

One of Valve's most impressive advancements is in voice-over technology, where you shout orders at your teammates while shooting the enemy. Clearly this is going to be tricky with a 28.8 modem, which is the weakness in the system, but the technology demo demonstrated across a Local Area Network was hugely impressive. While one of Valve's development team yelled into a microphone on another part of the Sierra stand, his on-screen character spoke for him.

It's more than just transmitting a wave file over the network, though. TF2 studies the wave file for timbre, pace and waveform, and animates the character's mouth to remain natural and in synch. Extra processing adds echo or other environmental effects depending on where you are standing. It's truly astounding to see it happening in realtime.

This voice transmission system is essential for the role of the new commander, who sees the game from above, with the roofs missing from buildings and up to 64 characters (human or AI 'bots') running below him. A cursor enables him to highlight any player to discover the character class (soldier, medic, engineer, spy, etc.) and health level. Using this information he can order his soldiers to kill medics, or find stranded scouts.

Graphically the game has been massively improved, the most significant being a new character mesh system which allows it to move tens of characters around, even though they are typically constructed from around 5,000 polygons. The system reduces the complexity of the model as it retreats into the distance, while applying huge numbers of polys to the face when the character is close up. Blimey, if the eyeballs aren't curved too.

Like Team Fortress Classic, TF2 is primarily a multiplayer game, although AI bots can become your pretend friends if you can't link up to anyone else. But this is the future of multiplayer gaming, where interaction is hiked up one more level. It's getting scarily like real life, so don't go starting your own paintball business right now.