Rarely have I been so instantly enamoured with a game as Straftat, a gleefully chaotic micro-FPS created by two brothers who couldn’t find a decent deathmatch shooter to play. Straftat pitches two players against each other in lightning-paced 1v1 duels. Less of a throwback and more of a distillation of the classic deathmatches of yore—particularly Half-Life with shades of Quake and Unreal in there too—it features dozens of weapons, 150 small yet wildly inventive maps, and a wonderful selection of hats, all for the low, low price of nothing.
Straftat is quite possibly the best deal on Steam, the only paid element being an optional, $5/£4.29 DLC that almost doubles the map count and adds a bunch of other features. That deal got better in February when French developers Sirius and Léonard Lemaitre added a chunk of extra maps, and even better-er in April when they did the same again. Now, barely a month later, they’ve added another massive update to the game.
The DLC & Maps update adds a total of 37 arenas, 4 new weapons, additional cosmetics, and a few quality of life features. Most of the new maps are for the free, base game. Themes include Valhalla—aerial maps with chequerboard floors and dusky illumination. There’s also Stadium, where every layout is surrounded by stands and seating, and Cage Fight, which is exactly how it sounds. The most unusually named mas is “Canliferous fluorspar”, which may sound like the Latin name for a Venus fly trap, but it is in fact a rather fetching night-time map with Mediterranean-ish architecture.
Some of these maps are remixed versions of vanilla maps added with the update. But it still amounts to more than 20 entirely new arenas to explore. Indeed, only 4 of the 37 maps are reserved for the DLC, including a Pig farm and so called “Surf Maps”.
The four new weapons, meanwhile, are a stun mine, a stun grenade, a “Bayshore”, and an Aboubi Head, which is a head of the sickly-green, chain-smoking humanoids you play as in Straftat. The addition of stun weapons is particularly enticing to me, as I can imagine how these might facilitate some fiendish ambush play in those Straftat maps with lots of blind corners.
Alongside the maps and weapons are several more specific new features. All players get a new racing system in the training ground, letting them indulge in parkour challenges and time attack speedruns. More importantly, though, the map selection menu finally has a search bar, which will make creating a custom map playlist a whole lot easier.
DLC owners, meanwhile, gain access to the map from Babbdi—the Lemaitre Brothers’ previous game—as a special training area, and also get an optional weapon randomiser for all maps, which is a pretty huge feature given how much replayability it adds. Oh, and there are also a bunch of DLC exclusive cosmetics, including six new jiggly hats and a “Horrible Smelly Head”.
If that doesn’t entice you to spend $5 on the DLC, I don’t know what will. But even if it doesn’t, there’s still a huge amount of fun to be had with basic, free Straftat. The Lemaitre Brothers also casually dropped the news of more major updates coming soon, including a 4-player free-for-all mode and 2v2 Team Deathmatch. Some of the new maps already seem designed to accommodate four players, but I’ve no doubt these features will be bundled in with yet more arenas, too, as these geometry-brained kids simply cannot be stopped from mapping.
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