Thousands of players flood into Team Fortress 2 Classified, the free 'TF2 Classic' mod that just launched on Steam

One of the best Team Fortress 2 mods around has been formally embraced by Steam. RED and BLU, meet GRN and YLW.

Team Fortress 2 Classified (formerly called TF2 Classic) has relaunched as an official Steam mod with its own store page and everything. The revamped TF2 Classified, now running on the official TF2 SDK that Valve released last year, is both throwback (hence its old "Classic" moniker) and additive: paring down the 19-year-old shooter to its pre-hats era while adding a select few new weapons, modes, and a whole new class.

Here's the elevator pitch, as pulled from the TF2 Classified Steam page:

• Meet the Civilian, a brand-new special class based on the legacy Team Fortress character, and deliver him mostly-unharmed to the objective in VIP mode.
• Use TF2 pre-release inspired weapons like the Nail Gun, the Dynamite Pack, and the Tranquilizer Gun, all redesigned from the ground up to feel right at home with what's already there.
• Go on a rampage in Multi-Team maps, where GRN and YLW bring their unique (yet strangely identical) brand of violence to Arena, King of the Hill, and more.
• Exclusive new gamemodes, including Domination and VIP Race—all playable on professional-quality official maps, with more yet to come.
• Jump pads, flak cannons, bricks, chains wrapped around your fists; made-in-house weapons that go beyond mere sidegrades, and dramatically change how you play the game.
• Extensive modding support, allowing players to customize the look of their game, and allowing servers to host advanced custom weapon packs and maps.
• A whole host of visual enhancements, including improved textures, models, mapping features, and restored toon-style shading that was mostly absent in the retail release.

Think of TF2 Classified as a fresh start, assuming you haven't already been playing it since its public debut since 2020 (or its earlier releases since 2014). It's a cleaner, simpler version of TF2 with some quality-of-life upgrades and new toys to play with. That's a fun proposition for someone like me who enjoys TF2, but was never dedicated enough to grasp all of its wild post-launch weapons.

The Steam launch is going so well that, well, playing TF2 Classified is a bit rough at the moment. Nearly 10,000 players flooded into the game as it went live, a pace that neither me nor mod team Eminoma anticipated. As of writing, both official and community servers have been crammed full for hours. If you make it onto one of the servers running the new VIP mode or 4team, stay in (or give that spot to me)!

The one time I did find a normal server, it was lovely. One of the first improvements I noticed was the redesigned loadout screen that makes it easier to swap out gear for multiple classes. As for new gear, I've mostly been messing around with that new Civilian class. He's a helpless buffoon with no weapons, but he can buff teammates with mini crits. Civilian is only really meant to be played in VIP, but it seems like it can be enabled at the server hosts' whims.

New guns are what really steal the show: I really like the Soldier's R.P.G., a harder-hitting rocket with an aggressive arc, the engineer's buildable jump pads (which totally redefine team mobility), and the Medic's Rejuvinator, a medigun replacement that trades the tether beam for a medicinal grenade launcher in the style of Overwatch's Baptiste. I do miss some of my vanilla TF2 guns, but these new guns are of such high quality that you'd believe they've always been there.

It's also just nice to, you know, play more Team Fortress 2. 19 years later, it remains Valve's best multiplayer work. Its timeless classes, modes, and art have stood the test of time, but its immaculate grasp of casual competition is increasingly relevant in an age of live service burnout. Classified doubles down on pre-live service purity by having zero microtransactions altogether.

One of Classified's most promising features is its expanded custom server tools, which allows community servers to "mount custom weapon packs, support advanced custom maps, and make drastic changes to game rules." The team also plans to support Steam workshop, which will host client-side mods that let you easily customize your TF2 (something that the vanilla game is touchy about).

Give this one a shot, especially now that it's as easy as clicking install.