Where to begin with Straftat, a hot off the presses multiplayer shooter that immediately stole the hearts of PC Gamer's FPS-likers? I feel like the highest compliment I can give is that it immediately demolished our news team's productivity, with declarations of "one more round, that one didn't count," extending one memorable lunch break well beyond our employer's allotment—nobody tell my boss!
Straftat is all about lightning-quick, 1v1 FPS duels on small but imaginative maps—70 of them in the free base game, with another 70 included in a $5 DLC. For perspective, Overwatch 2 has 34 maps for normal play, while Counter-Strike: Global Offensive accumulated more than 100 official maps over the course of its decade-plus run. Straftat's offerings aren't throwaway either—each one has a gimmick or twist that makes it feel like it could have been a server browser favorite back in the day. My fellow Straftat-obsessed coworker, PC Gaming Show editorial director Jake Tucker, likened Straftat's endless variety to Mario Party in his FPS newsletter Hit Reload.
Much like last year's Battlebit: Remastered, it's an insane amount of FPS for what it costs—whether $5 or free—and isn't bogged down with progression systems, battle passes, or limited time premium cosmetics. You unlock new hats for Straftat's ugly little potato men by finishing matches or nabbing achievements, but it almost feels like a parody of an in-game cosmetic addiction loop. My go-to jaunty fez was a reward for pushing a dead ragdoll off a map and into the void, while some kind of strange gnome mask appears up for grabs if I land a sniper no scope one of these days.
Straftat just feels generous, bounteous even—DLC-less players can still access the 70 bonus maps as long as the host of a match shelled out—and it's the rare game I feel just as comfortable recommending to an adult friend who hardly has time for the hobby as a hardcore FPSer. Straftat is pure shooter bliss that made me feel like I was back at a high school LAN party, 1v1 Halo 3-off at a friend's house, or logging onto one of my favorite modded Counter-Strike: Source servers.
Pubstomping
Straftat's movement should feel familiar to anyone who's played one of its Source engine inspirations (Straftat itself was made in Unity), but Straftat has a capacity for tricks and movement mastery more comparable to Quake and its like. The star of the show is one of the best-feeling crouch slides I've encountered in an FPS, with crouching out of a sprint speeding you up like you just dropped into a greased slip 'n slide. It feels zippy and aggressive, with a low skill floor for incorporating it into your own play—you don't have to spend hours perfecting movement tech to get going—while some of the sickos we've encountered in random queue have demonstrated there's a high ceiling for if you do want to practice.
Straftat's arsenal is impressive as well, with the game leaning into a large variety of disposable weapons. You toss them away to pick up another rather than reloading, and can dual wield any one-handed weapons together. Some of them feel absolutely incredible, like the assault rifles that operate like laser-precise, jacked up versions of Counter-Strike's AK and M4. Others are deliberately, trollingly shitty, but deployed in fun and interesting ways: A machine pistol that empties all of its bullets in a single trigger pull and sends your camera careening around from the recoil often appears on maps otherwise populated entirely with melee weapons.
If there are dud maps in Straftat, we haven't run into them yet.
Straftat's maps can completely change how you play—each one has a curveball, something to surprise you and make you rethink your strategy. One map sticks you in a courtyard with a fair bit of cover and mostly crappy guns, with the exception of a single spawn point for that godly AK-47 right in the middle. A more cautious player might keep to the edges and relinquish the valuable assault rifle, but my coworkers and I always just made a dash for it at the beginning of every round, the first one to crouch slide there mowing down the unlucky (and unarmed) second-place finisher. But getting there first wasn't always a guarantee of victory: Sometimes the speedier player would mash the pick up button too many times, accidentally dropping the rifle and relinquishing it to the loser.
Another favorite drops the combatants in a symmetrical, brutalist box of a map that looks like it came straight out of a Halo array. The only weapon spawns are proximity mines and non-damaging knockback guns. Matches here saw us booby trapping the whole map into some kind of World War I no man's land before engaging in a shoving match with the blast guns, each player desperately trying to wrestle the other into the minefields. I'm also a big fan of the looping ice slide that has both players—and a constant stream of spawning weapons—zooming downward until somebody eats it.
But even the more grounded shooter arenas feel great to play in and carry some spark of genius or whimsy. A vertically oriented, Hong-Kong-inspired city block always lends itself to great firefights, while another map's Escheresque stair stepping ruin populated with battle rifles feels like the perfect arena for hitscan shooter sicko head clicking—a proverbial "Fox Only, Final Destination" for Counter-Strike Deagle devotees. The send up of Twin Peaks' Black Lodge, meanwhile, not only tickled the lizard part of my brain that enjoys references to other things I like, but also made clever use of warp gates and identical rooms to offer up tense cat-and-mouse games.
If there are dud maps in Straftat, we haven't run into them yet, and my challenge now is just convincing more of my friends to get in on the fun. If I have one gripe from my time playing, it's that there's no in-game system for spectating matches and rotating players in and out for a group of three or more. But even this has a potential throwback, DIY charm to it: We just manually hopped in or out of the game, with active players streaming on Discord for the ones on the bench.
If you pine for server browser vibes, surf maps, or just being able to enjoy a great multiplayer shooter that's uncomplicated by the 20+ year drift of monetization and attention-demanding progression systems, Straftat is the game for you. It's nuts that this FPS is free, but if you're like me, you'll quickly decide that not only do creators Sirius and Leonard Lemaitre deserve five bucks for it, you also want to see what those other 70 maps have in store. You can grab Straftat and its $5 DLC over on Steam.
