Recent reviews by Fat Gandalf and his Isaac

Fun game to play with friends, still growing despite a sequel existing, funny overall

Great game, well optimized for potato computers (on the L4D1 maps, anyway), very fun overall.

I enjoyed this game quite a lot whenever I began playing in 2011. There was nothing like it at the time, and that admittedly hasn't changed much. This game is filled to the brim with personality, with a very fun gameplay loop to boot. The intricate balancing of the 9 classes to create perfect storms of chaos that aren't steamrolls for one side or the other (to a decent degree, anyway) made sure that the game stayed relevant for a very long time, and I frequently played throughout the 2010s, and even considered it to be my favorite game. My love for the game was faltering in the latter half of the decade, with Meet Your Match's disaster of a launch being a big factor of this, and yet I still enjoyed it.
Then the botting crisis began. In late 2019-2020, it became near impossible to play in Casual because nearly every official Valve server was swarming with cheating bots that would blatantly cheat while running towards objectives. The community was panicked, and there was hope for a quick resolution to this issue from Valve. But nothing came. What we got was the free to play portion of the community losing *all* forms of communication in-game, even the voice line buttons. Free-to-plays couldn't even call for medic. What a fix.
There was an attempt to encourage Valve to fix these issues around 2021, which was met with nothing but a hollow promise from the Team Fortress 2 Twitter account. The bot problem is still highly prevalent in Casual, even to this day. It has been 4 years and next to nothing has been done to resolve the bot crisis. If Valve refuses to resolve the issue, even whenever the entire community cries out for change, then the bots will be all that remains in Team Fortress 2's Casual mode. #FixTF2 #SaveTF2