Straftat recreates the experience of joining a random Half-Life or Quake deathmatch server in the year 2000

rockpapershotgun.com:

Babbdi was one of our favourite games from 2023. STRAFTAT is a multiplayer shooter from the same developers and it's exactly as transportive as its singleplayer cousin; not transportive to an unknowable brutalist city, but to the year 2000 - in the best possible way. It's out now.

Edwin wrote about Straftat's demo during Steam Next Fest earlier this month, but I can't resist the opportunity to write about the full release.

I spent much of my time in the late '90s and early '00s downloading user-made levels for first-person shooters like Half-Life and the Quakes. Sometimes from Fileplanet, sometimes directly from whatever random dedicated server I'd just selected from the browser. These levels almost always had an incomplete grasp of the affordances of the game - or even more charitably, were more interested in gimmicks than in balance.

What-ifs, basically. What if the level was just a big room with sight lines divided by pillars? What if there were no weapons on the level except for crossbows? What if the players started at opposite ends of a corridor with a single weapon in between them, a shotgun, which both have to race towards? What if players could reach a raised platform via a teleporter, and that was the only way up there, and there was, like, respawning grenades? What if a level sort of looked like that curtain room from Twin Peaks?

I'm talking about the brutal teenaged logic that leads to fy_iceworld. The answer to these questions is almost always: players will instantly find the unstoppable strategy, and the whole experience will become a race towards that unassailable position.

Yet there remains an irresistible appeal to these levels. That's why they're gimmicks.

Straftat builds a framework around these sorts of levels that turns them effectively into Mario Party mini-games. Fights are always 1v1, two kills wins a round, and the first to five rounds wins the match. The levels are small and players are agile, able to perform bumslides, leans and