HOLY FUCKING BAHRAG AN ACTUAL TF2 UPDATE

I knew this would happen. Just as I’m getting my teeth into an update for one of my favourite games, my other favourite games all get updates and news as well. In this case, while the Plains of Eidolon came out on Thursday 12th, here we are not even a week later with Jungle Inferno, that update we’ve been waiting for. After more than a fucking year.

And amazingly, it’s a multi-day update. Something we haven’t seen properly since the Uber Update. Which was back in 2014… no… 2013? Er… A really fucking long time ago. I suppose that’s what happens when a game is ten years old.

The theme this time is, obviously, jungles and infernos. Which means we’ll be getting that Pyro stuff soon. After over a year of waiting. Finally.

Day one starts off reasonably calm. Reasonably. Of course, having made us wait for so long, they’ve got to take it slow, but also show us a ton of content so that we get excited and not pissed off. That is probably why they’ve started off with the least objectionable content.

Firstly, we’ve got maps. Mostly Community maps. King of the Hill map Brazil, last seen in the depths of 4v4 competitive, is now official, alongside fellow KOTH map Lazarus, an attack/defend map called Mossrock (with a similar art style to Landfall), a jungle Payload Race map called Banana Bay and Enclosure, a standard Payload map with a pretty boring name compared to the others. They all look nice. Enclosure in particular looks like a Team Fortress-ified Jurassic Park map, complete with that electrified cage look around a capture point.

There’s also a map made by the TF team. Going by the name Mercenary Park, this is obviously the map that’s going to have the weird stuff. It’s actually a Three Control Point map, which either means it’s a short map similar to community maps made for 4v4, or it’s like Standin, the 3cp map that doesn’t really work with higher player counts since there’s too many people to actually capture all points at once. Although from the description, I think it’s going to be like Powerhouse, the 3 control point map released with the Gun Mettle update, since the description of Powerhouse is similar to that of Mercenary park.

Concluding the first day is a bunch of taunts, many of which were spoiled a few days ago via leaked Youtube images. This seems to happen a lot, I don’t know why they can’t upload their videos to Private or something.

Anyway, there are seven taunts, currently. The infamous ‘lighting your fart’ Pyro taunt isn’t present among them, but he’s got his own taunt anyway. Heavy and Engineer both get two taunts each, and there’s two Yeti-themed taunts.

The Yeti-themed taunts are weird. The first is a punching one, where a Yeti-shaped cutout appears (similar to the mercenary cutouts seen on training maps) and everyone punches the Yeti thing, making it fall apart, with custom animations for each class. That’s nice. The second one, your mercenary literally turns into a yeti and roars. That… makes no sense. And I’m left wandering whether that’s going to play a part in Mercenary Park.

The other taunts are kinda standard. Engineer gets yet another two taunts that he’ll be able to spam while sitting behind his sentry. Heavy’s taunts though are both pretty nice, with him lifting weights and doing pushups. Pyro’s one is…weird. Pulling a plate out of thin air with a head on it, sniffing it then letting everything fall to the floor. I hope Pyro isn’t really a cannibal, but you never know.

That’s it for day one. Let’s see what day two brings…