Team Fortress 2

This game shouldn't exist but it does.

I love this game more than I love myself, I’ve played it for 7 years and have almost 1500 hours. I first got into it because my crappy dell laptop couldn’t run much else but it hooked me and I’ve had years of fun memories playing it alone and with friends. That being said in its current state it’s not very fun to play. Bots run rampant leaving the only viable option to be community servers most of which are garbage and the few good ones have terribly long queues to join. There is hardly any new content and what is added is usually disappointing.

It kind of puts me in a tough spot rating it because my experience with it has been overwhelmingly positive and despite its current issues, the core game is still amazing. The characters and artstyle are great, the core mechanics are solid, and the gameplay is fast paced and skill based. Based on all that I’d give it a five but I wouldn’t blame people for rating it significantly lower based on the current state of the game.

Uguhghghhghhg its BORING but timeless

i'll keep this short seeing as i know nothing when it comes to video games and i might be talking out of my ass.

this game is fun but it's so punishing for no reason. at best, you feel like you have climbed a mountain whenever you see yourself improve at a mechanic but at worst, it feel like the game hates you. whenever you seem to have fun, the game throws random bullshit at you and at first the flaws feels small and meaningless but the more they happen, the more you realize how fatal they are.

the game has a clear focus on skill but random mechanics exist such as random crits and random bullet spread, autobalance ensures that whatever work towards an objective is meaningless, the hit detection is bad inconsistent for ranged weapons and downright atrocious for melee, there are countless visual bugs, spy is underpowered and unviable while sniper is questionably balanced and considered to be too powerful. i could go on but i wanna leave it at that.

all of those issues have plagued the game since its inception but the game developers themselves has unofficially abandoned it. what little new content we get is often lazy and uninspired. up until recently, all we had was items from the steam community workshop poorly implemented with no sense of quality control. they added a new gametype after 5 years and it came with countless bugs that, while funny, ruined it whenever they showed up and it's a less detailed version than the community gametype. hackers and bots are a constant and while that's true for every online shooter, valve just doesn't give as much as a shit to stop them. the hackers don't even care about hiding them anymore because valve won't care enough to ban them.

i love this game i wouldn't really recommend this game to anyone anymore.

07/06/23

I'm writing this review as to explain why I've chosen to not rate a game I've put almost 4,000 hours in and continue to dump more into. I'm not intending to properly review this game but the hours I put in should be more of an endorsement than I could put into words.

TF2 is at minimum a top 3 GOAT I would rate at 5.0 but I have trouble recommending given the current state of the game to new players who don't have any guidance into the problems which either as a result of poor aging, a lack of interest from Valve, or other more modern issues make the game confusing at best and unplayable at worst. These are the main problems I see with the game currently:

- The default settings are dated, unoptimized, and put new players at a strict disadvantage compared to a properly tuned setup. This includes small things like fast weapon switch not being on by default, which is how weapon switching works in every shooter I've played after this came out, to more subtle things like how the network settings often result in players dying right after they take cover from a sniper or how I still see players with extremely narrow 70 FOV charging through chokepoints. While this does not address all of my concerns when it comes to things like controls, mastercomfig overhauls many of these sometimes hidden settings and in my opinion, everyone should have it installed.

- No tutorials. Yes the game technically has four tutorials which cover extremely rudimentary aspects of just under half the game's playable classes, but these are not obvious to new players and are embarrassingly ineffectual when it comes to real matches. I believe it's best that this game is learned by playing with more experienced players if possible.

- Cheaters. Recently the game became overrun with many hundreds or maybe even thousands of bot accounts which most often would manifest in you queuing into a match where there are six snipers on the other team which would kill you the instant there was a clear sightline. This issue has died down immensely down to the point that these sorts of matches appear only every few days as opposed to half your matches. Regardless they are still present and other real players continue to use cheats as Valve's ambition toward dealing with cheaters in their more competitive games does not seem to carry over here. Cheaters will always exist in all games but this is an area that could be improved.

- Sniper. This is not the place to have a nuanced discussion of Sniper in the current year but suffice it to say, many players are in agreement that Sniper needs a reexamination given that the class is able to shut down large swaths of the playable area of a given map for fear of dying to a player you have an unfair expectation of being able to deal with at most ranges.

To reiterate, this is a game I love and continue to love because it is a very good game at its core, but I'm not addressing that aspect of the game at this time. For the aforementioned reasons, I can only recommend this game if you have other more experienced people to play with, or otherwise have a lot of patience and/or an understanding for what I've laid out here.

Consistently a dead game, therefore not very fun. I only play it because my friends play it. Not saying the game is bad, it's just not for me.