Here we go! After two years of build-up, Valve have finally taken the wraps off the long-rumoured new mode and third faction for their game of ratatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatboomdead.

‘Mann vs Machine‘ brings a co-op horde mode to Team Fortress 2, as five players battle legions of robots shaped in the image of TF2′s familiar classes. They are the Gray Horde, and they’re there for you to kill in incredible numbers. “Band together to survive all of the robot waves in a variety of missions to earn incredible loot and unlock new achievements,” it says here. And you get to do that from August 15th. That being tomorrow. Here’s a trailer for the new mode. It is a good trailer. It has good music. It has a Heavy with a head of steel. It has the suggestion of an enormous foe. It has me thinking “this is probably a very smart way to get people (back) into the game who’ve been put off by the all-knowing frenzy of the devout playerbase.” It also has me thinking “AI officially in TF2? Someone’s going to do fascinating things with that, eh?”(more…)