The good

The new heavy unlocks make him very fun, and the weapons are very well designed.. 1800 style gatling gun.. I'm using this as my main weapon now, even if it sucks.

Fists of steel turn him into a useful damage-soaker.

The stick of boom.. Oh god the stick of boom. SOOO much fun.. One crit whack can blow up anything.

Medieval mode is not balanced, but amusing to mess around with.

Some of the weapons have amusing downsides, like if you miss with the bleed bat, you hit yourself with it.

The Bad

Medic weapons are meh.. Not useful.

New grenade launcher is balls.

The ugly

Delivery system for these items are AWFUL.. 2 reclaimed + a weapon make these unreachable to new players, which is a bad design.
The Christmas crates are stuff you need to pay money for to open.. Which just spells greed right there.
Half of the unlocks you can't even get without opening those crates right now.. Makes the situation even worse.
TERRIBLE example Valve is making of this game.

Too much crap.. Most of these unlocks are gonna massively confuse ANYONE who is not explicitly familiar with the gear.

No kill icons for most of them.. Some of them don't even reuse the old icons

No new taunts. The stick of boom doesn't have a taunt, which is REALLY bad considering how fun it is.

More new hats, in case you weren't sick of them already.

-The medic weapons are excellent if you're a good team player
-The new grenade launcher is good if you aim well, but will probably be buffed soon
-The weapons are intentionally difficult to get for now - they will become increasingly easier to get in the following two weeks, letting people willing to pay get them earlier whilst graduating the stress on the item servers (this has specifically been stated as including all the crate items)
-The items system is geared towards graduating the items a player gets, allowing them to test out each weapon as they get them

The new grenade launcher is awesome. Go use it somewhere else than your average 32 man spampub.
Oh and learn to aim.
The fire rate is probably going to get increased to suit the spammier people.

I didn't try out medieval mode, was just fragging people with crit Cabers. So much fun. Hope it doesn't get changed.


I play mostly low-count arena, so I try to steer clear of heavy. He pretty much just utterly ruins the gamemode.

Medieval mode is pretty fun, but gets tiresome with half an hour straight of it.

Oh yeah.. One other good thing is that they took steps to prevent the crazy crashing that occurs after updates, especially the recent ones.

It partially explains why it's difficult to get the other half of those items right now.

It's not terribly effective, but targe + caber is incredibly fun, if only to mess around with. Two demomen with the same loadout can charge towards each other to play a game of chicken, should they choose.

Wait, there's a system for acquiring items? I thought that it was a random thing.

There's a quota for each week, it gets reset each wednesday.
I can't remember if it builds up after time or not...

Double drop-rate get!

Free keys too. Also all the formerly one-crate items all got 2 item or 1 item + 2 scrap recipes.