Team Fortress 2 Classified is good, clean, hatless fun, despite its cruel Horace ban

Team Fortress 2 Classified is out now on Steam, the mod having finally earned Valve’s blessing after a bit of a tizzy with its former name of Team Fortress 2 Classic. That makes it an easy one-click job to install, assuming you have the original TF2 installed, and it’s a fine piece of modding work in general: inspired by the shooter’s past without being beholden to nostalgia, while expanding itself with restored modes and weapons that Valve left on the cutting room floor.

Wisely, Team Fortress 2 Classified doesn’t drag itself all the way back to TF2’s very earliest days, where sticky bombs could explode through doors and glitched-out Engineers could build sentry guns in the sky. It is a simplified game in some ways, its lack of comedy cosmetics a proud selling point, but it keeps most of Valve’s best balance tweaks (Pyro airblast, movable Engie buildings, fewer bullshit pipe bombs for the Demo), Thus, it never feels like an stubborn old man of a mod, refusing to get with the times.

Its own additions are thoughtfully worked in, too. VIP mode, in which one team escorts a waddling businessman while the other attempts to give him the Archduke Franz Ferdinand treatment, was ditched by Valve on account of it essentially spoiling one player’s – the VIP’s – round by making them a defenceless civvy. In TF2 Classified, they’ve become more of an active support class, defensively buffing nearby teammates and occasionally powering up his bodyguards with a spell of mini-crits. The mode still plays out broadly like Payload, Valve’s bomb-pushing official replacement, but the ‘It sucks being VIP’ problem is solved; he’s the one teammate everyone wants to hang out with.

I’m less sold on some of the guns. The Scout’s nailgun, for instance, behaves almost indistinguishably from the Medic’s default syringe gun, and denies the little Bostonian nitwit the timelessly high risk/high reward Scout play of ploughing through someone with two point-blank Scattergun blasts. The Soldier, meanwhile, gets a weird arc-firing rocket launcher alt whose single shot makes playing Solly even more of an exercise in reloading. All the base game defaults are here, though, and sticking to them is no bad time. If anything, they reminded me of how lightning-in-a-bottle good TF2’s class loadouts are: for all the sidegrades and alternatives Valve have poured into it over the years, the original tools have always stayed viable and reliable.

Team Fortress 2 Classified understands that, and shows that knowing what not to touch is an important to a great mod as knowing what to change. I’ll definitely be playing more of it, and I may even be willing to overlook its one serious offence: in entirely removing custom cosmetics, the mod makes it impossible to wear the Horace hat. Pshaw! Be sure to express your own disapproval of this wanton act of endless bear prejudice (and claim your own wearable Horace) by joining the RPS Premium Supporters programme for the low, low price of £5.99 per month. While stocks last, which because they are pixels, is forever.