Recent reviews by Mint Jelly

I've played a lot of Team Fortress 2.

It's in a very strange position, given the context of its longevity. It is the progenitor of many live service models plaguing the video game market in present day, and serves as the template by which such games advertise their potential worth; that they will be long-lived, and justify a new player's investment of time. None of them, however, manage to make good on this marketing.

Team Fortress 2, meanwhile, shows us the opposite end of that supposed promise; a game that by virtue of its foundational quality as a first-person shooter, maintains a playerbase despite being borderline unplayable through the standard function of the matchmaking system. This is due to a proportionally small number of bot accounts joining servers and utilizing aimhack cheats, or remaining innocuous through basic movement and action commands until it's been on the server long enough to call random vote-kicks on actual human players.

TF2's economy is another matter; its seniority in the digital marketplace, and the sunk cost of innumerable cosmetics traded as digital currency allows its economy to retain not-insubstantial value among other live services on the same platform using a similar model, all while a proportionally massive number of idle bot accounts farm the automatic item drop system. And any new cosmetic items are sourced solely from community members, the same for holiday update content and organized tournaments.

The developers seem unwilling to engage with the treadmill of labor that would result from attempting to approach any of these ongoing issues in a substantive fashion, while at the same time remaining unwilling to involve interested parties of the community more deeply in the game's maintenance to some degree that would result in a more functional experience for new players just getting into TF2 for the first time.

Finally, the voice communication codec seems to have suffered some sort of issue when the game was reconfigured from 32 bit to 64 bit in a recent update which resolved some issues while introducing others, making even communicating effectively with one's teammates difficult if one's audio transmission volume is too low, without any way to verify or troubleshoot the problem.

For the moment, it appears as though TF2 is nearing EoL (End of Life), and unless someone is approaching the game with a group of friends, or is willing to explore existing community servers to find those friends, I cannot recommend Team Fortress 2 seriously as a new game to add to your entertainment roster.

Your time is valuable, don't waste it.