Soldat

From wiki.soldat.nl

Soldat is a small, fast, action-packed 2D multiplayer shooter made by Michal Marcinkowski. It can be played single player against bots or, more popularly, played online against other people. Soldat is what multiplayer was invented for, the official site reads. Soldat is a free game for Windows.

The game has a variety of modern-day weapons, ranging from the one-hit-kill, anti-tank rifle Barrett M82A1 to the normally vehicle-mounted XM214 Minigun (of course, the soldiers in the game are buffer than Schwarzenegger, so they have no problem holding such cannon) to even the bow and arrows wielded by legendary John Rambo himself.

There are multiple gamemodes each with their own gameplay styles; the most played modes are DeathMatch, TeamMatch, and Capture the Flag. To extend on this, there are three special options that give a completely new twist to each game mode:

• Survival mode, in which players don't endlessly respawn but instead battle until no one is left alive;
• Realistic mode, in which weapons are given more realistic damage—one well-placed shot kills you (as it should, anyway)—and in which your line of sight is limited by obstacles and distance, among other tweaks such as fall damage;
• And Advance mode, in which you start out with only basic secondary weapons and have to kill more to randomly earn better ones.

For most players, Soldat is a small in-between, easy to start, with little fuss, much fun, and direct action, but others take it more seriously; a grand scene has emerged with hundreds of IRC channels and clans in dozens of leagues. Special tools have been coded by fans like Polyworks, ZitroStats and ARSSE. Maps and mods are being made every day in all sorts and styles.

Soldat has existed for over six years now (see its Version History) and since that time a close community has grown. Meetings have been held and even LAN parties exclusively for playing Soldat have been organized since; for example, in April 2006 the German Selfkill community organized the Solingen Soldat LAN.

Michal Marcinkowski has promised to release Soldat as open source if he ever stops working on it himself (roughly estimated at around 2008 or later).