Just yesterday Adam wrote about Toxikk, a multiplayer arena FPS that aimed to take the genre back to its roots by invoking Unreal Tournament. Hey Adam! That’s not the root of the arena FPS!

Reflex, now on Kickstarter, has the right idea instead. It’s similarly “a competitive Arena FPS that combines modern tech with the speed, precision and freedom of a 90s shooter,” but the ’90s shooter its aping is Quake 3. The real root of arena shooters. And the best one.

Let’s re-start this classic videogame pub argument, and put an end once-and-for-all to the tedious ‘which is better LoL or Dota’ question. Here’s Reflex’s trailer:



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Which looks amazing, even if I can’t help but follow up “Skill-Based Movement System” with “That You Will Never Be Skillful Enough To Use.”

While the core mechanics look near identical to those beloved ’90s shooters, much of what the Reflex team have planned is in the infrastructure that sits around the game. That includes matchmaking, features to help with spectating of matches, an in-game replay editor for those slow-motion trickshot mash-ups, a training system and best of all, an in-game multiplayer map editor. I spent a fair amount of time as a teenager messing around with making Quake 3 maps, and I still love their particular architectural style – not the gothic or industrial themes, but the sharp angles and multi-level atriums and intertwining corridors.

Reflex is looking for a weighty $360,000 AUD, which is around £195,831.94 according to Google. $20AUD/£10.88 will net you a copy of the finished game at its estimated December 2016 release, while $35AUD/£19.04 gets you (at the time of writing) an early bird beta copy in August 2016. Those dates seem awfully far away, and while it’s nice they’re not underestimating, I wonder if that will hurt their campaign.