I find myself sitting at my desk after another Garry's Mod bender, wondering why I subject myself to such torture. Perhaps it's just a desperate attempt to relive my teenage years, or maybe even an excuse to socialize with people who I don't ever see in my day-to-day life.

But Garry's Mod has let me down yet again, so I must re-write my review. Again.

1. It's dead. The average peak player count since 2014 has been a steady decline, from ~60,000-70,000 peak players in 2014 to a laughable average of 35,000 in the past year.
But when I say it's dead, I don't mean laid to rest after a long, teary funeral full of goodbyes. I mean that the figurative cadaver of Garry Newman himself is currently strung up like a piñata, being beaten over and over and over ad nauseam, the assailants hoping that something, anything will come out of it. These people are milking the teat of a cow that stopped producing 10 years ago, and the current playerbase is either so blind or so desperate for another cheap hit of that childhood nostalgia that they couldn't care less if the cow drops dead and dies.

2. The playerbase acts as its own immune system, filtering out the "bad" players that they deem harmful enough to their communities. The issue with this, like all forms of community policing, is that there are little to no social repercussions for abusing your power. You have no recourse if somebody with enough influence doesn't like you, leaving you exposed to constant crybullying from the NEETs who still inhabit this game. The classic GMod admin stereotype exists for a reason; these people actually act like that.

3. There is no original content. GMod is functionally a gigantic Unity asset flip, with most server owners opting to use pre-existing content made 10 years ago by somebody who probably actually enjoyed the game, creating a cycle in which people are rewarded for minimal effort who are then even further disincentivized from creating good, original content. This would be an issue if the average GMod player was a functioning adult, but thankfully the majority of the playerbase are social rejects who are happy with whatever content they get as long as they can get their anime/bideogame/starwars slop directly loaded into their mouth by the shovelful. You'll join a server after downloading their bloated 240GB server file, only to load into 3D modeled anime girls running around holding lightsabers, classic Nintendo characters (not anymore LOL!) engaging in gunfights, and other gaudy, autism-fantasy-ish things.

4. GMod is poorly optimized. Who would've guessed a source game can't run 500 different workshop addons at once.

5. LUA is an awful language. Most servers are full of hidden LUA errors that tank your performance. Or cause you to crash.

i will continue writing this when i feel like finishing it