Garry's Mod

I came to GMod looking for a quick TTT session and walked away three hours later having built a cursed contraption on gm_construct that launched a ragdoll into the ceiling at terminal velocity. That experience is basically the pitch. Base Garry's Mod gives you two tools and no objectives: the physgun for grabbing, rotating, and freezing props, and the tool gun for welding, constraining, and wiring things together. From those two items, Facepunch somehow built the foundation for what eventually became dozens of self-sustaining multiplayer ecosystems. If you're here for a structured shooter experience, the base sandbox mode will feel like being handed a hardware store and told to make your own game. That's the point, but it's also the friction point for new players. The competitive multiplayer hooks come entirely from community game modes. Trouble in Terrorist Town (TTT) is the one I keep returning to. It splits a server into Innocents, Detectives, and Traitors, where Detectives carry DNA scanners to track killers from corpses and Traitors have access to gadgets like the Jihad Bomb for high-risk kamikaze plays. The social deduction layer is where the real game happens. Reading voice comms, watching player movement, calling votes, and bluffing your way through a round when you draw Traitor. TTT's TTK is low and movement is Source-engine floaty, so don't come in expecting tight gunplay. You're here for the mind games, not the aim duel. Server quality varies wildly though, and finding a well-moderated server with consistent players is genuinely the hardest part of the experience. The bad servers are loud, admin-abused messes. Prop Hunt is the other mode worth your time, and it translates to any group size with almost no ramp-up. Props get a 30-second head start to disguise as map objects before Hunters come online and start checking every suspiciously-placed chair and bottle. Hunters take damage for shooting real props, which creates enough hesitation to give a well-hidden prop a fighting chance. It's low-stakes, endlessly funny with voice chat, and the mode that Origin of Prop Hunt as a concept can be traced directly back to. Call of Duty eventually cloned it, which tells you everything about its design staying power. DarkRP and Zombie Survival fill out the active server browser if roleplay or wave-based co-op is more your speed. The Workshop situation is genuinely impressive and also the biggest source of headaches. Over 300,000 addons sit on the Steam Workshop, covering new weapons via packs like TFA Base, custom player models, full map overhauls, Wiremod for logic-gate contraptions, and Advanced Duplicator 2 for saving and sharing builds. The problem is addon conflicts, missing content errors when a server uses assets from games you don't own (Counter-Strike: Source dependency shows up constantly), and the occasional addon that quietly breaks something core. A 2025 update from Facepunch bundled commonly-needed CS:S and Half-Life 2 assets directly, which cut down the pink-and-black checkerboard problem significantly, but the dependency chain is still messy for first-timers. Expect to spend twenty minutes troubleshooting your first community server join. After that it becomes muscle memory. From a performance standpoint, the Source engine is long past its prime. On modern hardware it runs at uncapped high framerates without complaint, but the netcode shows its age on poorly-hosted servers. Rubber-banding in TTT during peak population moments is real. For a game where reading player position matters in deduction rounds, warping NPCs and delayed hit registration on budget server hosts can kill the fun quickly. Find a server running on decent hardware and it's consistently smooth. The game itself asks nothing of your rig at this point. Any mid-range setup from the last five years will run it at 200-plus FPS with no configuration needed.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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