Hopefully, after 9 years in development, etcetera etcetera. Launch TF2 is pretty boring to play now after the layers of updates its gotten adding the best maps and gameplay nuances, and I honestly think at some point in 2010-2012 it peaked more than it did at launch. Had tons of developer support creating gameplay additions, art assets and witty/genuinely funny writing for its promotional material (shorts, trailers, blog posts, whatever). It's aged pretty poorly due also to lackluster updates and pretty shitty additions as well, some really baffling stuff as Valve just slowly gave up on the delicate years-long dance of balancing and let it settle to be what it is now.

Art wise, this is probably the most fulfilled and uniquely specific concept in video games to ever come out of America. It has such a fantastic western setting and sensibility and Valve really stood out from other game developers with how mature yet indulgent the humor and style of this game is. Not completely unique as elements on their own, the Norman Rockwell / Leyendecker character designs, the impressionistic painterly environments, the decision to give game-play-distinct classes in a first-person shooter strongly defined archetypes that interact with each other in context-sensitive ways... How unbelievably immersive and transporting! There's a reason people call it timeless, they usually say something like "cel-shaded cartoon graphics," It's not just cel shading. its gooch shading and half lambertian terms and a lot of view-dependent stuff like rim lighting. its not a cartoon its a painting, DAD. It excels in a period of time in technology when, coming recently out of the more restrictive disk space and graphics capabilities of 2004's Half Life 2, the hype of maximizing the potential of systems was still in full swing, so the best of its engine was being harnessed to fully realize a live playable 3d artwork.

Gameplay, the most visceral and immediately noticeable element of the video games medium, is honestly a mixed bag. On launch there was still a lot for everyone to learn coming from the established mechanics of Team Fortress and the new quirks and intended systems of the Source engine, and also plenty of people who were new to either shooters or multiplayer shooters or just the degree of differences between each class, emphasized even more now by art direction. To skip an odd decade of balancing changes and learning and heartache, it's a lot of highs and lows.
Rocket jumping, the exhilarating, conceptually nonsensical and mechanically rich inheritance from Quake, flips one of the slowest characters into one of the scariest characters while granting you amazingly fun ways to traverse and explore an already fun to experience world. You can spend maybe hundreds or thousands of hours exploring the source engine's method of Quake Physics through just one mechanic through just one character's gun, the rocket launcher. And the sticky launcher, and the grenade launcher, and the wrangler, and the detonator, to varying degrees of success. Or take, for example, the Spy, a completely mechanically broken and easily-abused mess of hit registration problems and dated mechanics (why do backstabs not account for the Z-facing direction of either two players. This is a 3D game) that makes an easy to comprehend one-hit-kill pick class into a monstrously deep and unpredictable frustration to fight against... Assuming he doesn't miss the first hit. It's fun when you catch him with his pants down and have to play a battle of wits over the computer. Or when you come back for round two and try to suss out your own weaknesses in perception to catch him in the act. Or when you play him at all, honestly.
...On the other hand, you have a class like the Sniper. You scope in, you shoot shapely designed characters' shapely designed heads, you kill them. It's pretty simple, it doesn't even have scope sway or bullet drop-off (or any bullet physics for that matter, owing to the engine's method of bullet damage, an instantaneous laser that simply "makes damage" where it ends), and it's such a mechanically simple class that its mere existence defines and counters the rest of the games roster based purely on the player's own level of execution. Then you have the Heavy, the stalwart, moves-slow-and-shoots-a-lot tank of the cast, who protects his team by shooting... Moving... And eventually dying. (Hey, at least he's honest.) Or the Pyro, who, at launch, could only do meager damage per second and meek after-burn to someone who turned a corner without expecting him, being killed by the surprised someone anyway and hopefully, maybe, killing them because they didn't know where a health pickup was. If you see a Pyro, you walk away. If you play a Pyro, you walk that-away. Improvements like Air-blast and other more interesting unlockables contribute to this feeling that TF2, despite its long development time, still hadn't fully matured in its Gameplay until a while after release.
The maps, the world environments these individual pieces get to interact with each other in, also experienced years of maturity. While being artistically fantastic and interesting, they each stood still while the rest of the game's systems evolved without them. A sniper stands stiff on the balcony of 2Fort while an engineer turtles in the intel room. Dustbowl crowds flock through a single narrow hallway. Goldrush crowds flock through a single narrow mine-shaft. Badwater Basin... Why do people even like Badwater Basin? I just don't see the appeal. I think there's a large amount of people who, using the new "Casual" matchmaking system, only ever queue for games on half a dozen of the some-hundred maps there are to play. This is unfortunate because lobbies empty out when one game is over or vote for the same maps over and over again whether you like it or not, making you re-queue as well. Seriously, you had the system figured out already with quick play and the server browser! Official servers with map rotations where you can call a vote if a majority of everyone else is feeling up for something crazy. Community servers where whatever rules and gameplay changes they want are always going to be there. I guess I just have to be glad that still exists despite how insular, inhospitable, glitchy, barren and worn-out they all are.

Lots of people have plenty of things to say about the grace of TF2, and lots more have scathing remarks to say about its fall from said grace. The ultimate reality of the game is that, no complaining or whining or nagging or pining for a future of the game really matters, because its development cycle is done. The people who conceived it and worked on it for years leading up to release are not the same people who worked on it and maintained it for years afterwards who are also not the same scant person or two who log on to the blog to write a post about the newest workshop items added to the game. 15 years is a long time. People change, their lives change, their visions and goals for what they want to do in life and what they want to do for the world change. Even if the exact same people who all contributed to TF2's ideas, characters, shorts, maps, modes, from it's launch to its most ambitious updates, all unanimously decided to work on the game out of nowhere again with each other, they wouldn't even be the same people they were from 15 years ago, or 12 years ago, or 9 years ago, or 6 years ago. "B-b-but the community!" Is mostly stupid and weird, so no, I don't trust them to have even 1% of the tact or the resources necessary to test even the stupidest things Valve added to the game while also understanding the aesthetic and broad appeal or even the humor of the game's developers. Sorry!

Not to be a downer, it's just how it is: An almost completely perfect experience which fell to the wayside and was "finished" by its developers, not out of malice or incompetence, but mostly just that Valve was... done with it. Done with the whole game thing too I guess, lol. Now it's just VR and BCIs. Maybe the nightmare hellworld Matrix simulation will look just like my funny conga heavy game! :-D

Anyway, some things I couldn't weave into my review:
- ROBOTS! is the best part of the soundtrack and MVM is incredibly soulful and captivating as a concept and has tons of great assets made for it but doesn't really meet its full gameplay potential until you play the community maps
- The predatory gambling practices that this game did not invent but nonetheless popularize negatively influenced the entire gaming industry and created an inhospitable in-game culture around digital items which is gross and sucks. Unusual effects all look incredibly stupid and goofy and are worth HOW much money? What? Oh and now your rocket launcher costs that much too because it glows green and gives you pink horns? What?
- No one ever realizes how incredible it is that TF2 as a Triple-A company expenditure is genuinely funny. The people who worked on this game are funny and tell very funny jokes. This game from one of the highest points of a laughably openly evil industry is just made by real normal people and is largely unimpeded by boardroom politics like its contemporaries. This is a huge reason why all of its competitors fail to replicate, assume influence of or even just mimic it when what it "is" was just naturally manifested by its working conditions at Valve trying to bring a Quake mod into the current generation of video games.
- No amount of redditors singing its praises to the moon and back will trigger my contrarian reflex to say it is a bad game