Steam Next Fest serves up a brutal FPS with no live service nonsense, just pure 1v1 arena shooting with Call of Duty's sweaty slides

gamesradar.com:

Straftat is a game I love. Straftat is a game I suck at. Straftat is an exclusively 1v1 arena shooter where you can easily die without ever seeing your foe. Straftat is a cat and mouse FPS where you can bully strangers around dozens of concrete maps. And Straftat is my favorite demo so far in Steam Next Fest.

Let's rewind a little. Straftat comes from the Lemiatre Bros, the duo who previously released first-person explore-a-thon Babbdi, which also had a very similar low-poly style and focus on brutalist concrete architecture. The team's new effort is wildly different, much faster, and immediately heart-thumping.  

The Straftat Steam demo has a whopping 25 maps that'll soon balloon to 100 when the game properly launches on October 24, but none of them are filler. Most of them have a specific gimmick that gives Straftat a quick party game feel. One put me and my foe on two opposite rooftops with snipers nearby. Another spawned us in a concrete maze with a bunch of equippable mines, gently encouraging us to turn our friendly playground into a explosive deathtrap. 

Others are more straightforward arenas that encourage the sweaty slides you might be accustomed to from modern Call of Duties, with the more classic twitchy shooting from FPS giants of yesteryear, all designed to get you shooting within mere seconds and to get someone consistently dead within less than a minute.

What I love most is how it jettisons the live service fluff that has slowly turned every big game in the genre - including the ones I love - into busywork. Chores. Weekly to-do tasks. There aren't any signs of microtransactions, daily challenges, or unholy loadouts. All you have is a mic, whatever hope you have left, a little adrenaline, and your knowledge of the mini-map you spawn into. 

Straftat is very Halo-like in that sense, too, in that its learning curve is all about how intimately familiar you are with the environment. Game one had me running away, hiding under stairs, begging my opponent over