TL;DR – Operation Last Laugh is the latest community MvM map pack and is very, very silly. Much like it’s predecessors a free and fairly enjoyable experience whether you are playing with random players or friends. If you missed the event you might be able to find a community server running it, or can grab the asset pack for posterity and host your own server! You can download it all here
===Quick Aside for the uninitiated===
For those not in the know, Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is a free-to-play online class based shooter that’s been kicking around since 2007. The Mann vs Machine (MvM) mode itself has been in the game for over a decade now and features up to 6 human players facing off against waves of AI robots as they attempt to carry a bomb to the human player’s spawn point. These robots drop cash when they die, which must be picked up and which the players can use to upgrade their weapons and characters so that they can survive the ever more difficult waves of foes.
I suspect most people won’t be aware that while TF2 has been largely abandoned by it’s developers, it still has a surprisingly active MvM modding community and that these guys have been producing seasonal events (such as Operation Last Laugh) at a consistent rate for years now. I’ve never written about any of them before, but after wrapping up this latest April Fools day themed one thought I’d take a quick moment to draw some attention to their efforts.
===Aside over, you’re on your own now!===
Operation Last Laugh as the name implies is a community event that isn’t taking itself seriously and is essentially a mechanism through which map creators can take the piss and make memes come to life. As such each map and even each wave is very, very different from each other to the point that I’m going to write a quick paragraph on each map and then let you decide which to play. One final side-note I should mention is that there are 7 maps in total, if you complete all of them you get an in-game cosmetic medal and that you can also donate to charity (which grants you another, separate in-game cosmetic medal).
Operation Last Laugh: Cacophony of Cants
Cacophony of Cants is a moderately challenging map that does it’s best to keep the players guessing. It starts quite gently, then begins imposing barriers (which restrict where you can move) and pushing in waves of tricky bots that force you to think on your feet. From my experience players tended to die here more than they would on normal maps, but this was mainly due to the lack of movement space and the imposition of a time limit which encourages more reckless behaviour.
There is also a final TWIST involving a final boss, but I don’t want to say too much. All I’ll say is that this map features a lot of melee bots so don’t expect to let resistances carry you!
Operation Last Laugh: Collateral Damage
Watch out for that SENTRY BUSTER!!!
Collateral Damage is a map dedicated to Engineers to the point that every player must play as one. This map is pretty interesting, as it essentially forces you to exploit the explosive radius of each Sentry Buster to deal damage to the bots that besiege you. If you try to play this map normally, you’ll find yourself getting shredded and unable to prevent the bomb from being deployed.
As such the rounds become a juggling task, as you need to keep moving your sentries so that they’re close to where the bots are going to be, then once the Sentry buster starts it’s detonation animation you need to move it away so you can redeploy it to where the next group of bots will be. It’s great fun and the number of busters is vastly increased to allow you to mainly deal damage via the busters AoE damage.
One last thing to note is that there are multiple customised Sentry Busters, with a variety of effects. Some deal AoE healing to the players while others are on fire and set every player nearby on fire. There are even “boss” sentry busters that don’t die when they explode and another one that appears in the final wave that I won’t spoil 😉
Operation Last Laugh: Croissant Combat
Croissant Combat as the name implies is a Spy only map, which has a wide variety of custom weapons for the players to choose from. The map takes away your existing loadout, and instead you have to buy every weapon you can use from the upgrade station. Some of these are merely variants of the existing Spy loadout, such as tweaked versions of the stock spy-knife, stock revolver and the Your Eternal Reward knife. Alongside these there are some sillier weapons including a weeaboo knife and two different rocket launchers, although there is no disguise kit or sapper available.
As for the rounds themselves, the map starts with a “round 0” training round against some targets (to confirm that you have some accuracy with the revolver) before launching into the memes. There aren’t really any challenging waves sent your way, with the closest being a round in which you need to wait for a reverse-tank to move from your spawn to where the robots spawn. Ultimately this is a fairly easy but amusing map.
Operation Last Laugh: Mann Versus Machine
Mann Versus Machine is the name of the map and the game-mode, and I can safely state that this is the only normal thing about this map. The map itself is weird, with an unusual layout, a small size and a lack of vision. Each wave only gets weirder, with one wave requiring you to fetch items hidden around the map while others feature shrunken down enemies and extremely fast sentry busters.
Like most of the other maps in this event there are also a few memes sprinkled throughout, although the main one is a boss battle where you need to defend an item located next to your spawn from a certain someone that was fairly popular on YouTube 😉
Operation Last Laugh: Miss io n
Fitting somewhere between a Halloween map pack and an April Fools one, Miss…io…n is a heckin spookerino map that plays around with a bunch of horror cliches and generally doesn’t take itself very seriously. Unlike most of the maps mentioned, this one is first-and-foremost an attempt to break everything apart and as such doesn’t have that many rounds that are traditionally wave based.
Instead you need to escape from spooky monsters, survive “jumpscares” and ultimately survive a gauntlet of powerful enemies to flee from MvM forever. This map is definitely amusing and is challenging in it’s own way (I think it’s the one with the most group wipes from my experience!) despite being very different from the others. It’s very much worth playing, if only for the novelty, although it does require you to READ the text instructions lest you get butthurt and ragequit like one or two of the randoms I was paired up with.
Operation Last Laugh: Revengeance Status
This map is a blast and is just as rammed full of memes as the others, BUT is actually challenging without resorting to any weird gimmicks like Infinite HP enemies or introducing novel mechanics. Instead it’s more of a normal experience, albeit with a few modest twists which serve to ramp up the challenge while making the map more memorable.
- The first twist is that you are playing as the bots and are thus tasked from moving up from the Troop Crawler all the way through to the “human” spawn. This wouldn’t be too hard, as you are on the offensive you need to keep advancing which makes things more difficult for your engineers and medics.
- The second twist is that sections of the map will be blocked off by barriers, which can make things harder as you’ll have less space with which to escape from the “human” hordes.
- The third twist is that each “wave” also has a time limit, so you can’t just hang back and take things at a slow pace. Although from my experience this time limit wasn’t much of a threat, but your mileage may vary 😉
- The final twist, without wishing to spoil, is that there is a final boss “wave” that is fairly challenging but definitely not impossible. As such you’ll need to use all that $$$ to purchase your damage upgrades.
This map was the only one rated “Advanced” and it generally shows, although it was probably the most enjoyable of the maps offered in my humble opinion. It still has solid gameplay without sacrificing the memes and is fairly memorable as a result.
Operation Last Laugh: Sensational Syrup
Sensational syrup initially seems relatively sane, with one or two waves where you bully bots pretending to be friendlies as they rage at you in chat. Then there are custom enemies and some shenanigans but nothing massively untoward, until…
You start playing Wave 4, when a bunch of… adjustments are made which are a throwback to TFC. These changes are particularly challenging for Engineers to deal with, as they lose access to their PDAs and thus can’t build anything new! The adjustments themselves form the meat of the map as they require players to be more flexible and work as a team to fight back against a few fairly challenging waves.
You do regain access to your traditional load-outs for the final wave, which is the most difficult of the bunch. It’s nothing you won’t be able to overcome, but the combination of snipers and auto-homing rockets does make it a bit tricky!
In conclusion then Operation Last Laugh is a collection of surprisingly well designed maps, albeit with an above average amount of chaos involved. I’ve played through a few events by the Moonlight TF2 event and honestly Operation Last Laugh is one of my favourites. It’s really fun and I hope that anyone reading this review in the future is able to get the files and play through at least some of these maps with some friends!