Today’s release reveals it all. First off is the new, official melee unlockable, the sinister-looking Gunslinger, a robotic hand that attaches to the end of your arm-stump. But you already have a perfectly good hand? Think again. It’s not perfectly good enough. The Gunslinger, on the other hand, will give you +25HP, will always crit on the third punch of the same enemy, and allows you to drop “mini-sentries“. Mini-sentries cost only 100 metal, build 4 times faster, and deploy with full health. However they cannot be repaired or upgraded and only deal half the regular amount of damage, so only ninja Engies need apply.

On top of that is yet another official Valve payload map, this one called Thunder Mountain. I sure hope you like payload! This one is grassier than the others, and may contain traces of lap pool. Blow it up, too.

Furthermore, there’s some extra community content. That scary-lookin’ wrench by WatchMaker| you saw down the bottom is called The Southern Hospitality in-game. There’s also a new community CP map being thrown in, called ColdFront, a pretty snow-themed battlefield. And then there was some changes to existing items and abilities. Most relevantly, the Engineer can now pick up and re-deploy existing buildings, and the Sandvich, Gunboats, and Tribalman’s Shiv were tweaked a little. There’s a few new audio/graphical indiciators too. See the official update changelog for details.

The descriptions for the 35 Engineer achievements are also up, and strangely none of them refer specifically to the Gunslinger or the mini-sentries. Very strange. Also no mention of Australium anywhere in the update which is a bit of a disappointment. Then again, it’s not the kind of thing that would be highlighted.

Anyway, fire up your Steam clients and get downloading. Valve claim this to be “the biggest class update” yet, but it just doesn’t feel like it. Maybe it has the most raw content, but there’s not really anything we haven’t seen before. I am looking forward to be proven wrong, though.

Oh, and don’t forget another secret picture of Radigan testing out the Gunslinger!

Valve is lifting the lid on another new official payload map, called Hightower, which is as usual not terribly difficult to estimate the appearance of. Looks kind of like Upward, except less sandy.

On top of that, there’s a teaser of a new community wrench being released into the wild, fashioned by the venerable WatchMaker|. A rather scary looking one, too. Check it out on the bench at the bottom.

Today brings the secondary unlockable for the sentry wieldin’ Engy, the oft-suggested Wrangler, a joystick bolted to a hand-held somethingwave emitter, which the Engineer can use to manually control hi sentry gun! Of course this requires some careful balancing, since the gun is no longer guaranteed to be 100% accurate. You can see the details on the blueprint, but briefly it gets a shield that reduces 66% of incoming damage, doubles the firing rate (missile launch rate also increased), and once the Engineer switches away from controlling the gun, it is inactive for 3 seconds. Them’s some pretty crazy buffs, so I imagine it’s going to be quite a task to control it effectively.

Also available is the list of 35 Engineer achievements, not giving too many secrets away. There’s certainly no robots in there, but it looks like we’ll have a guitar taunt.

Speaking of secrets, be sure to check out two of the secret pages, featuring Radigan (and Radigan with the Wrangler), the Engy’s grandfather from the comic. Again, it doesn’t give much away except how manly he was.

EDIT: And so secret that I forgot to even mention it, there’s the mention of a brand new, official, Valve-created payload map named Upward. Yes, all these links link to the same page, but that what happens when Valve decides to put it all on one page. Anyway, expect some serious “vertical gameplay”, and a whole lot of fun.

The first reveal is the Frontier Justice, a shotgun replacement with half the clip size and no regular crits, but packing guaranteed “revenge crits” when the engineer’s sentry gun is destroyed (+2 per kill, +1 per assist). Seems like a good choice for ninja engineers who will be spending most of their time building sentries and picking up a few assists, giving them some extra kick when their guns go down to move on to building the next one.

There’s also a tonne of interesting posters hanging on the wall page to have a gander at – the Australium backstory is picking up weight and will presumably play a big role in later reveals.

In other news, 25 Golden Wrenches were handed out by Valve to 25 lucky players on the weekend, and there are 75 more to follow, being randomly distributed for crafting throughout this week! More update news every 25 wrenches, so expect roughly 25 per day. There has never been a better time to work that metal, but be aware that you can no longer smelt reclaimed or refined metal until after the update.

Good news, everyone! Now go craft!

Hopefully you might also be able to @ me before I go to bed so you can win a free copy of Portal for you or a friend! Hurry up guys!

-TheGooglePlex

It doesn’t give away too much about the forthcoming Engineer Update except that it’s going to be awesome. Go, read!

- Pie21

Anyways, I’ve made some guides to keep you happy for the while – there’s an Arena Guide in the Map Guides section and there are several more on the way!

Rabbit OUT

Great thanks to

The Complexity team

• coL.Jaeger
• coL.Seagull
• coL.Lopert
• coL.SolidSnake (Pro Targe n’ Charge FTW)
• coL.Enigma
• coL.Relic
• coL.Pure
• coL.Carnage (a little late sub in for lopert who switched to medic for Pure who had to leave)

The pubstar team

• Surefire
• D3STRUCTION
• Splinter
• Hooligan
• Chancellor
• General Admission
• Rolodecks
• Cannibal (Damn, I never want to play med when this guys sniping)
• Detective Kanye (iSpy)

For putting on a great show!

Also, thanks to

• Vinnie the Boss and friends For casting.
• Robin Walker and the TF2 team for that blog post
• All those people in mumble (OVER 9000!!! Well, almost)
• Litany from AI for organizing the servers.
• Cerious for organizing the pub-stars
• Nahanni for organising coL, the servers, and pretty much everything else!

Really all you guys rock. For any more info including a link to demos, check out the post on the steam user forums

I’m working on some guides right now (but they’re secret ) but I’m sorry about a lack of guides thus far this week – I’ve been very busy practising for my Grade 7 piano exam.

Rabbit, signing out.