Team Fortress 2 Smissmas 2025 is here, and there are now more festivized weapons than you can shake a Sun-on-a-Stick at

It's beginning to look a lot like Smissmas in Team Fortress 2. The fan-favorite yuletide event has made its annual return, bringing with it six new community maps, fresh taunts, a host of unusual effects, and, crucially, a ton of new targets for your Festivizer. There's also a slew of bugfixes, ensuring none of the pesky critters scuttle into your eggnog.

While Team Fortress 2 has more than its fair share of brrrr-ly battlegrounds, I'm always open to more snow (I live on the south coast of England, I need to get my fix somehow) in the FPS game. Fortunately, my wishlist has been fulfilled with the introduction of community maps Nutcracker, Sidewinder, Abbey, Winter Ridge, Matterhorn, and Gavle. Gavle is actually set in the real-world Swedish town, and Valve stresses it's pronounced 'yeah-vleh,' so apologies in advance when I inevitably say 'gah-vul' like the uncultured swine I am.

Over time, Valve has introduced festive iterations of some of TF2's most popular weapons via seasonal crates. You can also make festivized versions of many more armaments using the Festivizer, wrapping them in Christmas lights. This year, the developer-publisher's gone the whole hog, adding "lots of weapons" to the list of festivizables (I'm sure that's a word), courtesy of community efforts. By the looks of things, the majority of TF2's arsenal can now be festivized; you can even festivize Wrap Assassin, which is a huge win for the vibes department.

Of course, to get Festivizers you'll have to either crack open Winter 2025 Cosmetic cases (they're a bonus drop), or snap them up from the marketplace. Their value, unsurprisingly, shot up as soon as the Smissmas update went live, so we'd recommend choosing which weapon you want to project some extra Christmas spirit onto wisely.

Elsewhere in the Smissmas event, which runs until Wednesday January 7, 2026, Valve's slotted in three community-contributed taunts: The Critical Fail, Dead Mann's Drink, and Chairholder, as well as 20 community-created unusual effects (11 hats and nine taunts). There's also a comprehensive bugfix and tweak list. Perhaps most notably, Valve says it's "fixed Detonator jumps not being considered self-dmg jumps," which should now let you detjump during Quick-Fix Ubers.

Though it's still far from the amount of love TF2 got back in its heyday, I'm glad to see Valve is at least doing the bare minimum to keep it ticking over, while integrating more and more creations from its passionate community. A recent TF2 datamine suggests the game could be ported to Valve's Source 2 engine, potentially opening the door for a proper TF2 renaissance.

Until then, we still have rebranded community mod Team Fortress 2 Classified to look forward to at the end of January 2026. Promising a new VIP mode class, tweaks to existing weapons like the Nail Gun, and even more chaotic multi-team maps thanks to the introduction of the GRN and YLW factions, I can't wait to see how mod team Eminoma's work lands. Exciting times ahead.