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

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 mantling, meaning fights never last much longer than a minute. Being dominated in a fight? Don’t worry, you’ll be onto the next one in 90 seconds. Don’t like a level? Don’t worry, there are 70 of them and I’m yet to see the same one twice – and players can create playlists of their favourite maps.

There’s another experience from those halcyon days of server-hopping Straftat has recreated for me: that of making a single-server friend. I’m not going to lie, it takes some perseverence to find a Straftat match that doesn’t immediately close when you join. (By which I mean, it takes a few minutes of clicking servers in the browser – and thus is still preferable to the oft-long queues of modern matchmaking.)

When you do find someone to play with, I’ve often stayed with them for several matches in a row. There’s proximity voice chat, but I’m yet to turn it on. Instead, when dumped into the post-match room in which a winner is declared, and in which music blares, every opponent and I have leaned and crouched at each other, in a celebratory manner I take to mean “Hello” and “Good game”.

I’ve missed these dumb and oddly intimate moments with strangers, just as I’ve missed double-clicking on a server and excitedly wondering what daft .bsp world I was about to enter into.

You can grab Straftat from Steam now. It’s completely free, although you can spend a few quid on a DLC that doubles the number of maps and adds some cosmetics.