Isn’t Straftat a pleasing word to say? Straftat. It almost demands an angry bark, an accusatory finger. Straftat! The bite-sized two-player shooter was one of our favourite games of last year, summoning the fast-paced killthrills of ancient Quake servers as much as the quickfire 1v1 scraps of the gulag in Call of Duty: Warzone. And now it has a bunch of new maps. Not content with making the powerful pew-pew ’em up completely free (WHAT), the developers have added new weapons, features and a further 30 bullet-pocked arenas. And look, an icy and divisive fan-made map of ye olde Counter-Strike appears among them.
Included in the update you’ll find 15 maps named some variation of “TheSamePlace”. If you know your Counter-Strike history you will recognise the layout of fy_iceworld. A simple boxy set of corridors with a few waist-high cover spots, and a cramped central buy zone where you will certainly perish. The image above is Counter-Strike’s Iceworld, I should clarify, not the one in Straftat. That, you can see in the pics below.
Iceworld was a love-or-hate arena that was beautiful, panicky, and funny in its abstract simplicity. If there’s a game where this map belongs in 2025, it is undoubtedly Straftat. Yes, some existing arenas in the shooter already feel a lot like Iceworld. But this is a truly unfettered reproduction. And there are a bunch of other variations on the same layout.
There’s at least one other fun homage too. Unreal Tournament’s DM_Morbias also makes an appearance, with its panopticon-like lobby inviting all into the embrace of death (did you know you can now also get Unreal Tournament for free too?). There might be other mappy tributes in the big expandopack, but my arena shooter history fails me at this point.
The update also adds nine new weapons, including a katana and the Hill H15, an unusual prototype submachine gun from the 1950s that had a transparent magazine on the top. You can now also play a tutorial level, and set all the “active” maps you want into a playlist for more customised multiplayer shenanigans. All these additions and more are detailed in an update post by developers Lemaitre Bros.
Straftat launched with 70 maps – but you could buy a DLC pack that added 70 more. With this update an extra three DLC maps have been added to that buyable expansion pack. And another seven maps got quietly added back in November. All this brings the total number of murder playgrounds to a vertigo-inducing 180. Probably more if I’ve missed a few “alt maps”. That is wonderful. A playlist of death zones on shuffle. Or as our reviewer Rick Lane put it, “an anarchic first-person speed dater”.
As for Iceworld specifically, level designer Robert Yang once wrote a piece for us about the fan-made map’s legacy, comparing it to “the last desperate fight in the final circle of a battle royale, over and over”. He even went in search of the map’s original author. If you’re at all into mapping or just want to indulge in some multiplayer nostalgia, it’s a good read. STRAFTAT!