Team Fortress 2: Oops, all cheaters edition.

A quick google search provides downloads for various cheats from a whole lineup of different developers. Nothing is easier than downloading a cheat client and going undetected for months, if not years. Since Valve has stopped putting even the smallest amount of care into the game, and bots haven't been an real issue for nearly 2 years now, people bask in the delusion that TF2 is "fixed".

It's not. The removal of quickplay and addition of matchmaking has closed the door for any aspiring community server hosts, as only the official Valve servers have any sort of matchmaking mechanic, and opened so many more doors for cheaters to flourish and cheat developers to make some serious revenue.

It is virtually impossible to find a single casual game that doesn't have at least one blatantly aimbot and ESP using individual, and a whole bunch of bystanders who refuse to do anything about it, no matter how damning the evidence.

Since the official competitive mode is also both completely dead since shortly after launch, and free for anyone to join, provided they've spent enough time idling, this mode, too, is full of cheaters.

But the community seems to shrug all of this off as a minor inconvenience, as long as more and more workshop slop content gets added to the game for them to spend money on. Valve continues profiting without doing anything to earn it, cheat devs make a good living with Valve not even bothering to send cease & desists, and the game that I once fell in love with is now merely a pile of rotting remains of what it once was.

If you're thinking about picking this game up, feel free to give it a try yourself. But don't go in expecting the experience Youtubers 10 years ago had. Just like the world has become a much worse place since then, so has Team Fortress 2.

Update 2026:
The bots are completely gone, however the cheaters increase in number day by day. It feels even more impossible to find a cheater-free lobby than it did at the time when I initially wrote the review.
Even MvM, the PvE gamemode, has a lot of them. While usually not using an aimbot, these losers use a script to give themselves an infinite amount of credits, removing any and all challenge from the gamemode (which is already quite easy if you're not a complete idiot)
Casual is a whole different can of beans. If you frequent maps that have a high total playercount (Borneo, Upward, Barnblitz and mostly other payload maps) you may run into enough normal players to have a fun time. Play maps such as Hightower (a map that has always been popular with cheaters, and even more so with the terminally unemployed Youtuber [and closet cheater] Vorobey virtually only making videos on this map and harbouring an entire community of cheaters and cheat supporters in his fanbase), you will find that the games usually start out relatively normal, though as more normal players leave, their slots tend to fill up with cheaters (which I have to stress are 99% of the time Russian) and as these unemployment benefit enjoyers tend to play for 5+ hours at a time, the server eventually gets flooded with cheaters. Add on top of that that even a VAC ban on their profile (which means they have been found guilty of cheating in another Valve game or game running the same engine), blatant racism in chat, creepy behaviour or straight up hard toggling (turning their cheats all the way up in a fit of rage) is not enough to convince the average player to kick them from the lobby.

I thoroughly advise anyone looking to pick this game up in 2026 to just stick to modern games with actual support.