Soldat

What is Soldat?

Soldat is a fast-paced 2D side-view multiplayer shooter developed by Michał Marcinkowski. The game combines the overview of a sidescroller with the pace of a classic arena shooter: you run, jump, use a jetpack and a parachute and fight with an arsenal of assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and melee weapons.

Its trademarks are the physics-based ragdoll characters, the so-called gosteks, and the very direct hit feedback. Soldat plays extremely fast, rounds are short and the barrier to entry is low – the challenge comes from aim, movement and map knowledge.

Soldat ships with several game modes that can be switched freely on the server: Deathmatch, Pointmatch, Teammatch, Capture the Flag, Rambomatch, Infiltration and Hold the Flag. Bots can be added for rounds with only a few players, so a server still feels alive when it is not full.

On the server side Soldat is very open: the map rotation is controlled through a simple text file, custom maps come as .pms files and can be transferred to players automatically. Admin rights are granted through an admin password or a permanent admin list, and server-side scripting (ScriptCore 3) lets you add custom game rules, statistics or management features.

Alongside classic Soldat there is OpenSoldat, an open source successor that keeps the same gameplay but moved the server configuration to cvars inside a server.cfg. Both variants run on Linux servers; which one you are running can be told from the configuration files on your server.

Soldat is especially popular among players looking for short, action-packed rounds without a long learning curve, while still being able to use custom maps, bots and their own server rules. The game is available for PC via Steam.