What happens when you add a Portal gun to the already hilarious arsenal that Team Fortress 2 has? An even more hilarious game of epic proportions.

Last week, a video was released by the 3-Point Games Gaming Community that showed an early alpha build of the Team Portress Mod project.  Today, John, Mr_Mustash (Reddit friend of mine), and I were allowed into Team Portress Mod private server to get a hands-on demo.  To sum it up, it would be like saying “It’s something we never knew we needed.”  To read on for my full review and some video highlights, go past the break.

Please note that 2 of the videos are me playing the mod.  If it looks like I suck, it’s because I’m exploring the mod rather than using my super-powered-awesome-epic-pro-status-skills.

UPDATE: We’ve uploaded 2 more videos of Team Portress gameplay from a Scout’s POV

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3-Point Games community member, Pawn, is the creator of this mod.  Pawn said he has been working on this mod project since Portal 2 was announced.  He also added that it was just something that needed to get done.  His fellow community members told me that he had been through every inch of the Source SDK non-stop.

I asked if the Portal Gun and physics were tough to recreate in Team Fortress 2.  He told me that it was a bit tough, but he did do a lot of reading between both TF2 and Portal Wikis, which helped him out a great deal. As with alphas and betas of anything, there were a couple of bugs right from the start of our experience.  It reminded us immediately that even though this was a great mod, it really isn’t ready for “primetime.”

Some of the bugs that are in need of stomping were: the Portal Gun replaced your number “2″ key binding, sometimes the mod crashed the server, and because of the latest Source SDK update, other people couldn’t see that you were holding the portal gun.  It just looked like you are holding nothing in your hands.

Besides those little bugs, using the Portal gun in combat added a whole new strategy to Team Fortress 2.  For example, a couple of people playing the alpha test were engineers.  After building a level 3 sentry gun, they would create an exit portal right next to the gun, go find an enemy to fight with their shotguns, switch to the Portal gun, then shoot an entrance portal at their feet.  If you can’t see what happens next in your head, I’ll spell it out for you.  The enemy gets teleported right in front of the sentry gun for a sweet instant kill for the engineer. Now, how’s that for an “engy” update?

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All in all, the mod was really well done and excites me in the pants.  More so because of how huge my (that’s right ladies) Team Fortress 2 fandom is.  Like I said The Portal gun and physics added a whole new strategy and element to the game that could make the already fun and awesome game of Team Fortress 2  even better! Below are a couple more quick notes I wrote while playing:

• When completed, Pawn wants other “mappers” to build maps around the Portal gun element
• Projectiles do not go through the portals
• Shooting portals does not have the same speed as in Portal the game.  They shoot from the portal gun to the wall in the same speed as a regular rocket launcher
• Enemies can destroy your portals by shooting them and vice versa
• If you die, your portals get destroyed as well
• The Portal Gun, physics, and portals took over 2,000 lines of code to create

I would like to thank the 3-Point Gaming community for allowing us to test this mod and Pawn for creating something epic. I cannot wait for this mod to come out.  But I can wait for it to be bug free and polished.

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