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Welcome to Europe! Every server is gunlines of Tomislav heavies, Proof of Purchases perched proudly ‘pon heads full of undecipherable idiocy, blazing wildly away at each other regardless of petty trifles like “context” or “being outnumbered” or even “your goddamned monitor is off, there’s been a power cut”. Every server, you join to the sound of godawful Quebecois hip hop and 14 Tomislavs and “YES” “WHICH SICK MAN SEND BABIES TO FIGHT ME?” “MEDIC!” “MEDIC!” “DOCTOORRRR” and then there’s one dude, and either he’s on every server or every teen in France has exactly the same voice, but he’s speaking at some forbidden octave that rumbles bowels alarmingly and makes your dog go apeshit and attack furniture, and he has the breathy intonation of a man who is desperately trying to seduce you, whose every fibre, every Gallic morsel is devoted to placing his penis in whatever orifice you can bring to the table, but instead of whispering that you are the very light of the lampshade that is his soul, he’s saying he wants more medics, more MEDICS godammit, he is L’Héavy and his word is le motherfucking loi and he wants MORE MEDICS appeasing his fat self as he shoots his gun at a hapless Demoman on the other side of pee ell dustbowl, HE DOESN’T CARE IF HE CAN ACTUALLY GET A KILL HE IS JUST PLEASED THAT HE HAS A GUN THAT MAKES FLASHY LIGHT AND GOES DUFFDUFFDUFFDUFF IN A PLEASING MANNER you CROTTE-VISAGE. Oh yeah, go spy, go on, go and taunt them with your Dead Ringer, go carve bloody swathes through inattentive spinal columns, shank Medics who desperately holler for their bloated meat-wards to turn, oh sir won’t you please turn and save the serf that is ground upon the altar of your autism? Zut alors, I would give a million francs for you to turn around, save me from this tuxedo’d menace, turn the infinite fury of your gun upon that which menaces me with subtler tools and a devil’s cunning.

But no, ‘tis not to be, their white coats and obliging manner curry no favour amongst those slab-muscled avatars, those ferocious golems with the souls of European teens, they die, in their tens, their twenties, their infinite generations. Howls of teen angst go from Nice to Bruges, and I don’t even care that Bruges is in Belgium, they go anyway. But the Heavy Hivemind is implacable, it knows. It knows that no matter how many indignities it must suffer, no matter how many kill cams show waving snipers, no matter how many times the Spy laughs and says he will gut you like a Cornish game Hen, no matter how many soldiers beat breast after landing that one perfect rocket-Zatoichi that all such resistance is in vain. There is only the Heavy, and there is only the autistic fourteen year old, and there is only his game, forever.

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"Pyro is voiced by the same actor who does Spy, giving the game’s dramatis personae an interesting Captain Hook/Mr. Darling interior dynamic (in Peter Pan, the same actor traditionally portrays both Captain Hook and Wendy’s father, Mr. Darling, which highlights the pubescent female psychosexual drama in Wendy’s choice between joining the pirates and a Humbertesque father-lover, or going home to her real family). The Pyro is the Spy’s “hard counter”, meaning a class designed specifically to counter the abilities of another. Pyro’s wide swaths of flame can catch Spies who are using their class-based abilities, invisibility (“cloaking”), and disguising as enemy teammembers. This physically harms the Spies, but also blows their cover, as the flames are quite visible even when the Spy is not. They are the only two masked characters, and the only two characters who carry open flame—Spy’s in the form of his mascot, the daemon-like cigarette, a miniaturized faux-flamethrower, which trails him with a thread of smoke wherever he runs. Could the Spy have flame-envy?"