Jeff Gerstmann Senior Editor

Now Playing: Rise to Honor, Metal Slug 4, Soldat, SOCOM II, Metroid: Zero Mission

My New Shareware Addiction

It seems like it was just yesterday that I was using this space to talk about Crimsonland, a supercool top-down shareware shooter that you might describe as, say, Smash TV with the benefit of mouse control. Now, today, I've somehow become addicted to yet another shareware game, named Soldat. In short, I recommend that you go download Soldat right now, play it, and register it if you find it to your liking. But read on to hear a bit more about it.

My love for Soldat is rooted in my love for a pretty obscure 1996 PC release called Abuse. On the surface, Abuse wasn't really anything special. It looked a lot like your basic side-scrolling shooter. But what Abuse did differently was that it used the mouse to control your aiming. So, like the classic dual joystick shooters of yore, you could run in one direction and shoot in another in a very smooth, seamless action. This made Abuse unlike anything else on the market in its day, and this, combined with its cool graphics and nice, dark atmosphere, made it one of my favorite games at the time.

Stop reading this, and go play Soldat already!

Soldat is a 2D, side-view shooter that uses a control scheme that is extremely similar to the one found in Abuse. You use the keyboard to run around, but your aiming and firing controls are all handled by the mouse. Rather than put you in some dark, dank caverns (like Abuse did), Soldat puts you in the role of a little soldier dude in levels that, personally, remind me of some of the landscapes you'd see in games like Worms or Lemmings. However, unlike these two games, which were more strategic in nature, Soldat has all the action and gameplay of a first-person shooter--right down to the requisite Internet multiplayer support.

Yes, you can play against bots in Soldat, but competing against other players is where the real action is. The game has deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, a pointmatch mode, capture the flag, and infiltration, which is a CTF variant that puts one team on full-time offense and the other on full-time defense for the length of the match. Rounding out the modes is rambomatch, which adds a Rambo-like bow and arrow to the mix.

The side-view action is fast and fun. Each player is equipped with a jetpack, so you can rocket around the arena and hop from platform to platform as you see fit. The game also has a good selection of weapons, including all the FPS standards, like a shotgun, dual pistols, various assault rifles, a grenade launcher, and a sniper rifle. Since you can't really have a zoomed-in view in a side-view game, the sniper rifle's advantage is that you can scroll the screen further (in any direction) when you're crouched, thus giving you a wider view of the action than the other players get.

Soldat is extremely easy to pick up and play, but there's definitely a method to the madness, which means that you'll have to practice up to get competitive. The free version of the game only has a handful of restrictions, but with an amazingly low registration price of $9, it's hard to not want to register it immediately.

As the software publishing business becomes both larger (in terms of numbers of units sold) and smaller (in terms of the numbers of companies actually publishing), it's sometimes hard to see an independent developer making a real dent. The truth of the matter is that quality independent software is still being made. However, it's just a whole lot harder to find these days. So let me give you a few pointers: Get Soldat. Play Soldat. Love Soldat. And if you want to support this sort of development, buy Soldat. OK. Carry on.