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June 18

Sauerbraten: The Open-Source FPS

Do you like multiplayer First Person Shooter games? How about free ones? Sauerbraten (a.k.a “Cube 2″) is a freely available FPS that’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Sauerbraten has great online multiplayer gameplay, featuring several modes of play, such as Regen Capture (an addicting Capture-the-Flag type of match), Instagib, and Cooperated Edit. And you can play “normal” FPS mode too.

The game has an amazingly easy to use level editor integrated. Nearly everything in a Sauerbraten level is made from varying-sized cubes. The cubes can be stacked, punched-out, textured, and molded into non-cube shapes to build pretty much anything you want. You can add place water, lava, glass windows, invisible barriers, ammo, powerups, flags for Regen Capture, etc. to the level. If you get bored editing maps by yourself, you can take it online, or just across a LAN, with Cooperated Edit. There’s no way you can imagine the chaos of ten people editing the same map at the same time.

Sauerbraten is a very well-made game, reminiscent of Quake III, as some have said, and it’s highly addicting. The game’s two strongpoints of multiplayer gameplay and editing earn it a Knights of the Joystick rating of 4.5/5. There’s still some room for improvement, but the open source community will see to that. Open source packages are constantly evolving, and I have no doubt that Sauerbraten will become even better in the future.