After 3500+ hours of experience, growing up with this game has been great.

Say what you will about Valve not retaining a proper update schedule, or how toxic the community is, or how much you miss that dead ringer croissant-corpse bug; there's always an incentive for players to come crawling back to this game.

In terms of gameplay, it's one of the oldest and most well-known team based shooters out there. The characters are uniquely designed with memorable personalities, diverse sets of weapons for each individual class, and a beautifully-made subplot in its own online comic series (which can be found on the official website, definitely recommend a read). Casual mode, competitive mode, community servers that support minigames like Gmod's Prop Hunt or boss fights in Freak Fortress, and even a mode named Mann vs. Machine where you fight waves of robots with teammates, Team Fortress 2 provides gamemodes suitable to all audiences.

The game has its own economy, where players trade using metal and keys as currency. What used to be a primitive, simple trading system has now turned into a virtual stock market of refined metal and keys, with third-party companies like ScrapTF to profit out of this ol' geezer of a game. Some players view this game as it is; a game. Others view it as an investment opportunity full of fortune and glory. To each their own.

As for its community, expect players to act arrogant and condescending in competitive, micspamming in community servers, people moaning about "how awful these updates are", and not-playing-the-actual-game friendlies. However, that doesn't mean there's great people out there on the battlefield. I wouldn't have met some of my great friends today if it weren't for this game. I stuck with a now-dead community named Commonwealth Gaming for five years, became an administrator there since mid-2015, and met the most diverse internet strangers you could imagine along the way. Hell, I even tried to run my own trade server, New Commonwealth, with friends and CWG regulars to support it, and had a good, short run. And damn did I have fun while it lasted.

While this game hasn't stayed true to its form with all the official/community updates and changes it's had in the past ten years, it is still being played today by veterans, newbies, and everyone else alike.

After 3500+ hours of experience, growing up with this game has been great. Say what you will about Valve not retaining a proper update schedule, or how toxic the community is, or how much you miss that dead ringer croissant-corpse bug; there's always an incentive for players to come crawling back to this game. In terms of gameplay, it's one of the oldest and most well-known team based shooters out there. The characters are uniquely designed with memorable personalities, diverse sets of weapons for each individual class, and a beautifully-made subplot in its own online comic series (which can be found on the official website, definitely recommend a read). Casual mode, competitive mode, community servers that support minigames like Gmod's Prop Hunt or boss fights in Freak Fortress, and even a mode named Mann vs. Machine where you fight waves of robots with teammates, Team Fortress 2 provides gamemodes suitable to all audiences. The game has its own economy, where players trade using metal and keys as currency. What used to be a primitive, simple trading system has now turned into a virtual stock market of refined metal and keys, with third-party companies like ScrapTF to profit out of this ol' geezer of a game. Some players view this game as it is; a game. Others view it as an investment opportunity full of fortune and glory. To each their own. As for its community, expect players to act arrogant and condescending in competitive, micspamming in community servers, people moaning about "how awful these updates are", and not-playing-the-actual-game friendlies. However, that doesn't mean there's great people out there on the battlefield. I wouldn't have met some of my great friends today if it weren't for this game. I stuck with a now-dead community named Commonwealth Gaming for five years, became an administrator there since mid-2015, and met the most diverse internet strangers you could imagine along the way. Hell, I even tried to run my own trade server, New Commonwealth, with friends and CWG regulars to support it, and had a good, short run. And damn did I have fun while it lasted. While this game hasn't stayed true to its form with all the official/community updates and changes it's had in the past ten years, it is still being played today by veterans, newbies, and everyone else alike.