What indie competitive games do you play?
Recently, I discovered a desire to play some small, easy-to-pick-up, not-demanding-on-hardware video games with short gameplay sessions that also require some skill to master. Many years ago, I played a few games that I liked very much. But now their online lobbies are dead, so I have to discover something new. So, what indie competitive games do you play?
I spent a lot of hours on CS2D and Altitude. CS2D is like Counter-Strike, but with a top-down view. It simplified the necessary skills for a shooter but was still fun to play. This game had all the modes from classic CS, but with small additions. I liked two modes the most: capture the flag and deathmatch with lasers. CTF mode had quite long sessions, even lasting for hours when teams were balanced. It was also fun to build turrets, walls, and spike traps, which made it possible to play a completely new class compared to CS — the engineer. The mode with lasers was fast-paced chaos that actually had its charm.
Altitude was a 2D shooter with airplanes and a side-view. I played a lot of the soccer mode. In this mode, two teams spawned on a football field with two goals at each end of the pitch. The ball was magnetic, which helped to catch it, and you could shoot it, allowing you to pass. I liked how each class of airplane was pretty well-balanced for this mode, allowing players to fill specific roles on the team and enabling dense and fun gameplay.
I'm looking for something similar that I can run occasionally on my laptop and that has an active community.
BattleBit Remastered sounds like it'll fit the bill. Shooter, vehicles, big maps/servers, runs well on weak machines. The population really dipped but recent news of a new big update revitalized it to some degree, can't say I've checked the server livelihood myself though.
I also play Net Driver, a digimon fan game with a heavy PvP focus. Not sure if that fits your bill so much. It is hard to play casually, but sessions are short.
I don't play them any more, but I had fun with this WWI FPS series:
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/BlackmillGames
Challenging in their own way, and pretty much no fully automatic guns.
I opened the link and thought "hey this looks like Verdun!" and then scrolled down and saw that those other games are from the same developer and set in a different WW1 front.
I really enjoyed Verdun, but had a hard time getting my friends to play with me. I've always enjoyed bolt action rifles in WW2 shooters, and having the game mainly focused on them felt really fun to me.
I once felt like this game was basically airplane dogfighting but with arena-shooter types of wacky weaponry, and it felt like it had a high skill ceiling to me. I played it when it was released and there were actually people on the servers. That said, it never had much of an audience, is completely dead today, and I'm sure is no longer under development so I cannot recommend actually buying it. It never felt like more than a quick unity engine proof of concept demo anyway. Same dev went on to contribute to Peak so I'm glad they've hit bigger since.
I sort of struggle to come up with many examples of indies with online multiplayer at all. Towerfall came to mind but then upon checking I reminded myself it's local-only for multiplayer.
I would assume fighting and fighting-adjacent games like Rivals of Aether or Lethal League and their sequels are already something you're aware of if you're asking questions like this, and likely weren't your style as they're not alike to your examples.
Similarly, maybe something like Frozen Synapse? It's turn based though, and I don't get the impression that's the type of skill you had in mind when you said skill based. I also don't know how much of a community it has, I've literally never played it.
Hope you find some stuff you like though.
Technically not Indie but it's open source now, MS Allegiance: https://store.steampowered.com/app/700480/Microsoft_Allegiance/.
Pickup games only happen on Saturdays and Sundays. I recommend trying it on a Sunday around 3 pm Eastern to see if it's your thing. It's a combination of first person ship flying/shooting and RTS and probably runs even on a potato hardware wise.
I played Advance Wars by Web competitively for a bit, and by that I mean I played ranked games and stopped playing when I realized I was spending more time than I had planned thinking through my turns. The game is asynchronous, and you can play many matches at once. There is a live league where the turn time is reduced from days to minutes to force more real time play.
The Discord server is very active and there are several content creators who regularly put out match recaps, tutorials/strategy videos, and other content related to the game.
There is no tutorial or bot matches, so if you are brand new to the game, you could always play the GBA and DS games that this is based off of. I would also recommend anyone who is new to AWBW to check out the wiki, even if you have played the Advance Wars games before. Certain mechanics function differently in AWBW, one of the main ones being how transport units function at the end of a turn. I.e. you can bring an infantry into a transport copter that has already moved and deployed a unit and then use that same transport copter to then deploy the infantry unit on the same turn, which can be used to extend the movement of that infantry by an extra space.
If anyone is interested in trying it out, you can add me on AWBW (pekt99) and I'd be happy to play some friendly matches with you.