Sick of playing Team Fortress 2? Tough break

The ride never ends

When was the last time you played Team Fortress 2? During the Gun Mettle event way back in the summer? Maybe when they introduced that weird sports mode a few months back? During Halloween? This very morning in your little Pyro themed underoos while you drank your Atomic Bonk energy drink? NOT RECENTLY ENOUGH according to Valve. So in its continuing effort to make sure you’ll never escape the year 2007, TF2 is introducing yet another update/event/bear-trap-to-keep-you-playing.

The Tough Break update seems structurally similar to the Gun Mettle update. A $5.99 cover charge gets you into a fabulous (metaphorical) VIP room of (non-metaphorical) contract killings and guns. As you complete randomly distributed contracts, you will be rewarded with random cases that contain random guns, that are randomly graded by rarity and conditions. It’s like a Russian nesting doll of tragedy.

It wouldn’t be an update without a few new maps and some extra cosmetic items. It’s been such a long time since I’ve been able to keep up with all the other new maps introduced to the game, that these are functionally meaningless to me. For all I know they’ve been updating the game with the same three maps slightly renamed for years now. The new hotness you can spend yet more money on are a few new taunts, including a bagpipe jig for the Demoman. Really, it took them eight years to actually put bagpipes in his hands?