Our favourite shooter of the year was look all the best custom lobbies rolled into one.
Our best FPS is a game that’ll have you saying, “1v1 me, bro”, but in a good way. For more awards, check out our Game of the Year 2024 hub.
Jake Tucker, Editorial Director, PC Gaming Show: STRAFTAT makes me feel old. Not like the way my knees crunch as I get out of bed each morning or the way I don’t understand TikTok, but in the way STRAFTAT channels the FPS games that I used to waste hours in as a teenager.
The 1v1 battles sound hypercompetitive: The “two players enter, one player leaves” styling at the heart of STRAFTAT may evoke the thunderdome, but there’s an inherent ridiculousness because of the collection of random levels that lays things out like Mario Party for murderers. In one you’ll fight in a maze of corridors with assault rifles, in another you’re sliding down an icy slope hurling landmines at each other, or fighting each other with repulsor guns and knives as you try to knock your opponent to their doom.
STRAFTAT’s biggest strength is that no matter how silly it looks, the guns feel great, the janky art style always lands, and the level design is on point. Each round will take seconds to play out and it’s intensely competitive, serious stuff. This is the core of things and it holds STRAFTAT together because no matter how silly the maps get or how ridiculous the weapons are, it’s clear the Lemaitre Bros have a deep understanding of how they want these 1v1 matches to play out, and they haven’t compromised on that vision. So, I guess it actually is a Thunderdome. But the participants are going at it with nothing but rubber knives and a yoyo.
Morgan Park, Staff Writer: It really is something special. Like a modern LAN party in a can, STRAFTAT is a fundamentally social FPS with the sort of quick-session magnetism that makes folks want to huddle around a Discord stream and call “next.”
I can’t say enough about those 70+ maps: a deep pool of battlegrounds both regular and extremely weird, like the one where the only gun pickup is at the end of an obstacle course, or the one that’s just the Red Room from Twin Peaks. STRAFTAT is that bookmarked Team Fortress 2/Unreal Tournament server with all the good maps. And somehow it’s free.
Evan Lahti, Strategic Director: It’s so good to have a Quake-adjacent shooter that drips with slapstick. You can’t help but laugh when your first seconds of life, sprung from the gate (“SPRINT, SLIDE, GRAB GUN ASAP”), immediately culminates into “You found a baseball bat, but your opponent found a rocket launcher or a gatling gun.” Futily swinging the thing as you get absolutely vaporized by some guy named Toilet Boss 99, your body ragdolling into a bottomless pit. It’s Soviet Looney Tunes.
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: My only problem with STRAFTAT is that I’ve been playing it enough to get “annoying good” at the game. Not actually good, like good enough to beast all comers in random queue (there are some hot hands out there) or hold my own at a purely theoretical—at least at the time of writing—STRAFTAT tournament, but good enough that it’s getting hard to recommend STRAFTAT to more easygoing, well-adjusted friends. I know that we’d load in and I’d wall jump and crouch slide to the primo weapon spawns I know by heart, grinding my buds into the dirt and making them never want to play any game with me again, let alone STRAFTAT.
And that’s a damn shame, because this is an FPS with some genuine everyman appeal. It doesn’t try to hook you with progression loops tied to limited run seasonal content or whatever. It keeps me coming back with a joyful “one more round” magic that has me feeling like I’m playing CS 1.6 or The Specialists at a LAN party in 2009.
Jake Tucker: I, for one, have grown tired of Ted apologising profusely as he murders me on map after map
Morgan Park: I’ve been on both sides of that one Ted. Showed it to a friend who didn’t want me to go easy on him, but I won enough to turn him off the game. Then I played with another friend who just embarrassed me for a half hour straight. Not exactly STRAFTAT’s fault, but a party mode with more players would go a long way!
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