Babbdi was one of our favorite games of 2023. STRAFTAT is a multiplayer shooter from the same developers that is exactly as mobile as its single-player cousin; not transporting you to an unknown brutalist city, but to the year 2000 – in the best way possible. Now it’s out.
Edwin wrote about the Straftat demo during Steam Next Fest earlier this month, but I can’t resist writing about the full version.
In the delayed 1990s and early 2000s, I spent most of my time downloading user-created levels for first-person shooters like Half-Life and Quakes. Sometimes from Fileplanet, sometimes directly from whatever random dedicated server I just selected in the browser. These levels almost always had an incomplete grasp of the game’s affordances – or even more charitably, were more interested in tricks than balance.
Basically a “what if.” What if the level was just a enormous room with sight lines divided by pillars? What if there were no weapons on this level except crossbows? What if players started at opposite ends of a corridor with one weapon between them – a shotgun that they both had to rush to? What if players could reach the raised platform via teleporter and it was the only way up and there were grenades spawning there? What if the level looked like that room with the curtains from Twin Peaks?
I’m talking about the brutal teenage logic that leads to fy_iceworld. The answer to these questions is almost always this: players will immediately find an unstoppable strategy, and the entire experience will become a race towards that unstoppable position.
However, there is still an irresistible charm to these levels. That’s why these are tricks.
Straftat creates a framework around these kinds of levels that effectively turns them into Mario Party minigames. Fights are always 1v1, two kills win a round and the first to five rounds wins the match. The levels are tiny and players are agile, capable of sliding, ducking and manhandling, meaning fights never last longer than a minute. Being dominated in a fight? Don’t worry, you’ll be on to the next one in 90 seconds. Don’t like the level? Don’t worry, there are 70 of them and I’ve yet to see the same thing twice – and players can create playlists of their favorite maps.
There’s another experience from those carefree days of server hopping that Straftat recreated for me: making friends on one server. I won’t lie, it takes some persistence to find a Straftat match that doesn’t end immediately after you join. (I mean, it takes a few minutes to click through the servers in your browser – and that’s why it’s still a better solution than the often long queues of state-of-the-art matchmaking.)
Once you find someone to play with, I often stay with them for several games in a row. Proximity voice chat is available, but I haven’t turned it on yet. Instead, when we are thrown into the post-match room where the winner is announced and the music blares, all the opponents and I bow and crouch, which I take to mean, in a ceremonial way, “Welcome” and “Good game.” “.
I missed these silly and strangely intimate moments with strangers, just as I missed double-clicking on the server and excitedly wondering what stupid world of .bsp I was about to enter.
You can grab it Straftat now on Steam. It’s completely free, although for a few pounds you can get DLC that doubles the number of maps and adds some cosmetics.
