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by Vincenzo Doyle (7th grade)

So you’ve read the title, (I hope) and seen the thumbnail, and maybe you have already play the game or have at least heard of it, but not enough people know about it and if you do, !!CONGRATS!! If you’ve played Overwatch or seen it this is what inspired it: Team Fortress 2.

But what I'm really here to talk about is how TF2 and at the time of writing this publication, the player count is approximately 91,000 on the Steam charts. But that is from the last 30 days in October during the Scream Fortress event, which would boost the player count by a bit because of free Halloween items. However, before all these events and community wars there was just a fun first person shooter game.

Back at the release in 2007, it was just a new valve game in the source engine that had literally exploded in popularity, and it used to just be you choose one of 9 classes being, Scout, Soldier, Pyro, DemoMan, Heavy, Engineer, Medic, Sniper, and Spy. Now, if I were to go into depth this would be a book not a news article, so I'll just say my favorite 3 characters, them being DemoMan, Heavy, and Sniper.

Starting with Demo: he is able to set traps that he can activate whenever he wants to, and has a subclass called Demo knight where he uses his melee, a shield which allows him to charge forward to close the gap between enemies and boots improve the charge. Heavy is a tank that deals high damage and has lots of health and can even equip a sandwich that will heal him back to max health when eaten. Sniper is a long range single target pick class that will attack one to two enemies at a time, and with his low health he is the prime suspect for anyone who can get behind the back lines to mess with his work. And if you would like a more in depth look into the characters, I would suggest the Complete History videos by After Breakfast with SquimJim.

 The main reason I decided to write this article is because the game is slowly losing players, and that's because it hasn't had a major update since 2017, and people just lose interest in the game and with bots and hackers taking over most of the official valve servers; it's hard to play the game anymore without just turning it off because of boredom.

But I'm here to change that. I want to bring more people to TF2 for the first time or bring them back and if this article did convince you I may just completely change your opinion with one word: COMPUTER.

You need a PC to play it and it doesn't have to be that powerful but just getting one can be hard and when booting up the game most people are deterred by the 15 year old graphics but there is a fix for it in settings and there are YouTube videos that details how to fix it.

The game still is free but just needing a PC is why not many people play it, but if you do have a PC get it off steam and try the game and if you see me in the hall give me the word if you enjoyed it.