In my opinion the best online team based first person shooter to exist currently. It's core mechanics and gameplay have reached a degree of polish essentially unheard of for its genre which others (such as overwatch) have attempted to emulate yet fallen short. It's not a fluke that this has been one of the most popular games on steam for over a decade since it was released in 2007, and it still has a large vibrant community even almost 12 years later. Unfortunately Valve hasn't been giving it much love the past few years as they're very focused on more profitable ventures such as VR but the community makes more than enough content to compensate. It has a colorful cast of characters and well fleshed out lore including its own comic series and official source film movies (both highly recommended). The game is entirely free to play and no competitive advantage can be purchased in any form, stock weapons are the best overall and essentially all trading is for cosmetics. It does have a somewhat steep learning curve at the start so it can be daunting for new players but the incredibly high skill ceilings allow you to spend literally thousands of hours improving your gameplay. The game also plays incredibly well casually as well as competitively and I find it is far more overall fun to play as opposed to games which take themselves to seriously. Overall I highly recommend this game.

In my opinion the best online team based first person shooter to exist currently. It's core mechanics and gameplay have reached a degree of polish essentially unheard of for its genre which others (such as overwatch) have attempted to emulate yet fallen short. It's not a fluke that this has been one of the most popular games on steam for over a decade since it was released in 2007, and it still has a large vibrant community even almost 12 years later. Unfortunately Valve hasn't been giving it much love the past few years as they're very focused on more profitable ventures such as VR but the community makes more than enough content to compensate. It has a colorful cast of characters and well fleshed out lore including its own comic series and official source film movies (both highly recommended). The game is entirely free to play and no competitive advantage can be purchased in any form, stock weapons are the best overall and essentially all trading is for cosmetics. It does have a somewhat steep learning curve at the start so it can be daunting for new players but the incredibly high skill ceilings allow you to spend literally thousands of hours improving your gameplay. The game also plays incredibly well casually as well as competitively and I find it is far more overall fun to play as opposed to games which take themselves to seriously. Overall I highly recommend this game.