The Soldat 2 Demo Is Out And It’s Great

Published 6 months ago:

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Image: Soldat 2

The world needs more mindless fun, and one of the perfect games for that in the early ’00s was the multiplayer 2D shooter Soldat. Nearly 20 years later, and maybe at the best possible time given the circumstances, a demo for the sequel has dropped.

The demo is playable on PC, Mac and even Linux, which is great for everyone stuck on crappy work laptops with terrible integrated GPUs and nothing to do. It’s available from the Steam page (look for the Demo link halfway down on the right hand side) and features two playable modes.

One Man Army is a solo mode that lets you face off against waves of harder and harder enemies. Capture the Bases is straight from the original Soldat, although for those who haven’t played Soldat, it’s basically the equivalent of Domination.

Beyond that, it’s just getting used to the controls. Double tapping W rolls backward, holding down SHIFT throws your body forward Superman-style, which narrows your hitbox, and holding down right mouse button gives you a jetpack. You can rebind all of this, of course.

You can make GIFs with the press of a button. Given all the chaos that quickly emerges when everyone is running around with shotguns, rockets, AKs and grenades while doing Superman dives in mid-air, that makes sense. The Soldat team know their audience.

When you first open up the demo, the game gives you a feature roadmap. A multiplayer early access launch is due sometime next quarter, with the base features locked in by Q3 2020 and a level editor introduced in Q4. The full Early Access launch is due out by Q4 next year, but I honestly wouldn’t wait for that. Soldat 2, just like the original, doesn’t need a lot to be fun. Just give me my shotgun, my jetpack and I’m ready to go.

Man, Soldat is great. Go get the demo now on the Steam page.