STRAFTAT: the arena shooter where you hear your hunter breathing

With more than 350 maps and a fiercely attached player base, the real question is whether anyone else will be in the lobby with you.

The sound gets there first

STRAFTAT keeps the microphone live inside the arena. Anyone close by can talk, shout or just breathe, and that sound reaches you along with their footsteps — proximity chat built into a short-round shooter, not an extra buried in a menu.

The rest of the game is lavish with ground to fight over: more than 350 arenas, each with its own weapons scattered across the map — pistols, explosives, katanas and long-range launchers waiting to be picked up mid-fight rather than chosen from a loadout screen. A round ends when one player is left standing, and the modes run from straight duels, 1v1 and 2v2, up to four-player free-for-alls. Hats and cosmetics are rewards for challenges, not storefront items.

Free since launch, it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and takes keyboard or controller — DUALSHOCK 4 included — with family sharing enabled. The only paid things are two pieces of extra content sold separately from the base game.

No website, a steady drip of patches

The studio is two people, Sirius Lemaitre and Léonard Lemaitre, and Lemaitre Bros publishes the game itself — no company site, just a Discord channel for official support. It reads like a small operation looking after its own game after release.

Open the update feed expecting a new map and you'll come away disappointed: what lands there is a list of fixes. The most recent one goes after animation desync and round-transition bugs, tunes the profanity filter and lets the server list show what to expect from each room without joining first. Earlier updates had already dealt with the same kinds of things: grenade sync, a crash while sliding, aim tweaks. This is upkeep, not a relaunch.

The compliment that keeps coming back isn't about the maps

The people who have been playing STRAFTAT longest land on the same thing: aim and movement, with no fat around them. One player with 105 hours on record describes a clean arena shooter built on aiming and moving, with no mechanics to spare. After that many hours you'd expect fatigue to be the loudest voice — that isn't what comes through in their account. Another, at 8 hours, likens the pace and the weapon lineup to the golden age of Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake III Arena, and puts it down to a team that chose fun over every other priority.

The soundtrack and the art come up from one player to the next, in Portuguese and in English. A Brazilian with 40 hours on record credits the soundtrack and the movement for keeping them playing with friends; another, at 47 hours, reaches for Halo 2 multiplayer and PlayStation 2 arcade shooters to describe how aiming and moving feel, and praises the music in the same breath. One player only 10 hours in had already made up their mind about the look and the sound.

One player says they played BABBDI, the studio's previous release, and recognises the same knack for making good games — they're curious about whatever comes next. Even among those who speak well of it, though, there are caveats: just 3 hours in, another player already singles out wall-running as the thing that needs work — a sign that even the satisfied don't consider the package finished.

The complaint isn't the gun, it's the lobby

Hardly anyone with a bad word for the game goes after the shooting or the arsenal — they go after the room they landed in. A Brazilian player with 6 hours on record describes matches that are hard to find and rooms that push newcomers straight out. Another, writing on 19 September 2026, says they were killed close to ten times without ever reaching a weapon — picture dropping into that room for the first time, with no idea yet where the next shot is coming from. The reason, they say, is spawn points that favour whoever is already armed, with nothing in place to balance a beginner against a veteran in the same match.

Another player, writing on 8 September 2026, agrees about the root cause but gets there differently: lopsided spawns make the luck of landing near a good gun matter more than skill, and the vertical layout of the maps doesn't help. For someone who simply didn't take to the idea, at 1 hour on record, the problem was never technical — it was how the game feels and how the weapons work, off-putting from the start.

The worst case came from a French player with 12 hours: after buying paid extra content for the account, their connection turned unstable and they started getting kicked out of their own room, in a game they describe as stable when they first played it. In none of these accounts is the complaint about shooting or moving — it's about what happens around it: who's in the room, and whether the connection holds.

For anyone with people on the other end of the mic

STRAFTAT delivers what it promises to anyone who turns up with company: a regular group of friends on proximity chat, short rounds, a different map every match. It's a game for people who already have someone to play with, not a place to meet strangers in comfort.

For anyone going in alone, without a crew and without the patience to be thrown against far more experienced players in the very first round, the most common complaint from the other side — uneven spawns, rooms that empty out, matchmaking against people who have the game figured out — is the risk you take, right there. The aim, the game gets right for you; finding a fair place to use it comes down to luck.

One line sums the place up: STRAFTAT nails the aim; the lobby is the gamble.