Scout Review

While I had planned to post here more, I hardly ever get round to it for some reason. I'll keep trying to post as often as I can, but more often than not I'll be playing a computer game as soon as I hit the computer. My last post from work didn't post, and wasn't saved, so I won't be doing that any time soon again.

With the thought in mind that I play an awful lot of Team Fortress 2, and that I have most of the unlockable weapons (since I play on the PC) I thought I'd post some of my thoughts, in this case, how I find the classes, and what I think of their upgrades. This means I won't post about classes like the Demoman until i've played their upgrades a bit, so after their released. I also at this time don't have all the medic upgrades, so won't post about that.

Scout, currently the second on my "Most Played" which is still well behind the Engineer, but I love playing a scout even though I particularly suck at it.

The fast moving and double jumping is amazing, and it kinda feels like playing an entirely different game to the slow Heavy, or the tricky Spy.

FaN - Scatter Gun
The Force a Nature is great, the push back is really why I like this gun, while it fires twice quickly before needing reloading, it doesn't do as much damage as the normal scatter gun. The fact you need to reload the thing so quickly, is the main reason I'm starting to move towards the idea of not using it, and going back to the scatter.

The pushback is really useful in maps like Nucleus, but not great in other places I find, pushing someone back is hardly the most useful thing. True with the quick shots and extra bullets its possible to kill someone before they can fire back, but it's not very likely. With the normal scatter gun you could get the third shot in before the FaN would be reloaded, maybe even a fourth shot.

Bonk! - Pistol
I sometimes have great fun with the Bonk! drink, unfortunatly it's not as useful as the Pistol is. At medium to long range the Pistol is much better than the Scattergun, but when you've got Bonk! equiped that option is gone.

Since I mostly play Arena games, the idea of getting past a sentry gun isn't brilliant, and Bonk! lets me down more often than not in other situations, since people can simply follow you.

In area control, or payload it can be great to distract sentries for someone else to take out, for moving past heavies, or any other number of things. But in arena i'd go for the Pistol every time.

Sandman - Bat
The sandman is great, and infact the most fun i've had with the game was shortly after getting my first sandman (I think I have about 6 now...) even if you're not close to people, the fact you can say stun a heavy then a friendly solider can blow them up. If you're quite close to someone, stunning them can lead to a kill alot of the time which is brilliant.

The obvious bad thing about the Sandman is the lack of double jump. While the FaN helps slightly in that aspect, I especially missed the double jump since I got the FaN well before the Sandman, and was tripple jumping some things.

But the question is, is the stun a good enough reason to lose the double jump? I'm undecided at the moment, and have no idea how long it'll take me to decide. Stunning an uber is great fun, but so is running up to someone and killing them with your bat without needing to wait for a ball to swing first. You do half damage to stunned opponants, so running up to a sniper who can't see you you actually want the ball to *miss*.

Summary
The scout's selection are I think the best example of the alternate weapons showing that they are infact alternate. Alot of time I'd easily be able to pick which is best, but for the Scout it's very touch and go and I may very much end up going back to the original selection soon. But the alternates are so useful and helpful it's hard to make that decision.