Team Fortress 2 Classified is good, clean, hatless fun, despite its cruel Horace ban

Team Fortress 2 Classified is retired present connected Steam, the mod having yet earned Valve’s blessing aft a spot of a tizzy with its erstwhile sanction of Team Fortress 2 Classic. That makes it an casual one-click occupation to install, assuming you person the archetypal TF2 installed, and it’s a good portion of modding enactment successful general: inspired by the shooter’s past without being beholden to nostalgia, portion expanding itself with restored modes and weapons that Valve near connected the cutting country floor.

Wisely, Team Fortress 2 Classified doesn’t resistance itself each the mode backmost to TF2’s precise earliest days, wherever sticky bombs could detonate done doors and glitched-out Engineers could physique sentry guns successful the sky. It is simply a simplified crippled successful immoderate ways, its deficiency of drama cosmetics a arrogant selling point, but it keeps astir of Valve’s champion equilibrium tweaks (Pyro airblast, movable Engie buildings, less bullshit tube bombs for the Demo), Thus, it ne'er feels similar an stubborn aged antheral of a mod, refusing to get with the times.

Its ain additions are thoughtfully worked in, too. VIP mode, successful which 1 squad escorts a waddling businessman portion the different attempts to springiness him the Archduke Franz Ferdinand treatment, was ditched by Valve connected relationship of it fundamentally spoiling 1 player’s – the VIP's – circular by making them a defenceless civvy. In TF2 Classified, they’ve go much of an progressive enactment class, defensively buffing adjacent teammates and occasionally powering up his bodyguards with a spell of mini-crits. The mode inactive plays retired broadly similar Payload, Valve’s bomb-pushing authoritative replacement, but the 'It sucks being VIP' occupation is solved; he’s the 1 teammate everyone wants to bent retired with.

I’m little sold connected immoderate of the guns. The Scout’s nailgun, for instance, behaves astir indistinguishably from the Medic’s default syringe gun, and denies the small Bostonian nitwit the timelessly precocious risk/high reward Scout play of ploughing done idiosyncratic with 2 point-blank Scattergun blasts. The Soldier, meanwhile, gets a weird arc-firing rocket launcher alt whose azygous changeable makes playing Solly adjacent much of an workout successful reloading. All the basal crippled defaults are here, though, and sticking to them is nary atrocious time. If anything, they reminded maine of however lightning-in-a-bottle bully TF2’s people loadouts are: for each the sidegrades and alternatives Valve person poured into it implicit the years, the archetypal tools person ever stayed viable and reliable.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Valve

Team Fortress 2 Classified understands that, and shows that knowing what not to interaction is an important to a large mod arsenic knowing what to change. I’ll decidedly beryllium playing much of it, and I whitethorn adjacent beryllium consenting to place its 1 superior offence: successful wholly removing customized cosmetics, the mod makes it intolerable to deterioration the Horace hat. Pshaw! Be definite to explicit your ain disapproval of this wanton enactment of endless carnivore prejudice (and assertion your ain wearable Horace) by joining the RPS Premium Supporters programme for the low, debased terms of £5.99 per month. While stocks last, which due to the fact that they are pixels, is forever.