Garry's Mod

The most-upvoted negative review of Garry's Mod, at 875 votes, was written by someone with 4,110 hours in the game:

I really like this game. Like, a lot. I mean, seriously. I have 3000+ hours in it. I really, REALLY like this game. The reason why I don't recommend it is because of the community.

It was posted in April 2015.

That is this game's entire review page in one artefact, and it's why I've spent most of today telling readers to check dates. Fourteen of the twenty most-upvoted negative reviews of Garry's Mod predate 2020. Thirty-two of the hundred do.

What those old reviews are arguing about

Three separate controversies, all long dead.

A 310-vote review from April 2015 warns that "Garry is planning to incorporate paid mods". That was the Steam Workshop paid-mods experiment, which was withdrawn within days and never returned. A 106-vote review from 2013 is furious about "Garry's Mod 13" removing props. A 352-vote review from 2015 is about Five Nights at Freddy's fans flooding the Workshop with duplicate uploads.

None of these describe anything a 2026 buyer will encounter. They sit at the top of the negative column because Steam ranks by helpfulness votes, which accumulate forever and never expire — the same mechanism that put a launch-day review atop Half-Life: Alyx and a pre-1.0 review atop Slime Rancher.

Meanwhile, 99 of the hundred most recent English reviews are positive.

The complaint that is still live

One theme runs from 2014 straight through to 2024 without fading: the community. Community, kids or toxic appear in 36 of the hundred negatives, spread evenly across the decade — 3 in 2014, 5 in 2015, 7 in 2021, 7 in 2024.

The substance is consistent. Public servers are unmoderated or badly moderated, voice and text chat are frequently hostile, and reviewers describe encountering harassment and content they'd rather not. Several also report admin abuse on the larger servers. A 2,098-hour player who has been playing since 2009 describes watching game modes "be born, grow to their prime, and then die."

I can't audit thousands of independently-run servers, and I'm not going to characterise a twenty-year-old community of millions from a review sample. But the pattern is consistent enough, and durable enough, to be worth a plain warning: the game is excellent, and open public servers are a lottery. Play single-player, with friends, or on a curated community server, and almost every complaint on this page stops applying. Multiplayer scores a 6.5 for that reason and not because the netcode is bad.

Why it's still worth eight dollars

Because nothing else is this. Garry's Mod handed players Valve's entire asset library, a physics gun and a Lua API, and the result was two decades of invention: Trouble in Terrorist Town, Prop Hunt, DarkRP, murder mysteries, roleplay servers, machinima, and an enormous number of developers who started here. Originality scores a 9.5 and I'd argue it deserves more.

The Workshop is the other half. Mod, Workshop and addon terms appear in 41 of a hundred negatives, mostly from people complaining about download sizes for content they clearly want.

And it is still being made. The announcement feed shows a November 2025 update, a December 2025 patch, and an April 2026 update — including, per one item, finally improving NPC weapon handling nearly twenty years in. For NZ$7.49 with no DLC ever, the value here is close to unmatched; the only thing in this library that competes is BeamNG.drive at eleven years and counting.

What's genuinely dated

The engine. Source in 2026 looks its age, textures are low-resolution, and many popular maps expect you to own other Source games or you'll see missing-texture errors. Crashes and large addon downloads still appear in the negatives, if only 6 apiece.

There's also no onboarding at all. The store page says it plainly — "We give you the tools and leave you to play" — which is honest but means new players lean entirely on community tutorials.

The verdict

Garry's Mod earns an 8.5. As a creative object it's a 9.5: it invented a category, sustained it for twenty years, and is still receiving patches while a million and a quarter people have registered an opinion about it.

It isn't higher because the engine is genuinely old, because it teaches you nothing, and because the public multiplayer experience — the thing its own most devoted players warn about most — is a real and unresolved weakness after two decades.

Buy it. Ignore the top of the negative column, which is arguing about 2015. And if you want the version of this game everyone remembers fondly, play it with people you already know.