Red Eclipse is a free and open-source arena first-person shooter with a heavy emphasis on movement: instead of walking into a fight, you wall-run, dash and boost your way around compact arenas while trading shots with opponents. The project started in 2009 as a fork of Cube 2: Sauerbraten and has been developed in the open ever since by an all-volunteer team, most recently porting the game to the modern Tesseract engine for the Red Eclipse 2 release series.

Key Features

• Parkour movement as a core mechanic — wall running, boosts, dashing and other tricks turn map traversal into a skill of its own rather than a way to reach the next firefight.
• Twelve distinct weapons — the Pistol, Energy Sword, Super Shotgun, Submachine Gun, Flame Thrower, Plasma Inductor, Electro Zapper, Laser Rifle and Corrosion Cannon, plus the collectable Frag Grenade, Shock Mine and Rocket Launcher.
• Loadouts and arena pickups — you spawn with a sidearm plus two loadout weapons chosen in the Player Setup menu, and pick up explosive weapons lying around the level to bolster your attack.
• Tesseract renderer — fully dynamic omnidirectional shadows, global illumination, HDR lighting, deferred shading and morphological, temporal and multisample anti-aliasing replace the precomputed lightmaps of the old Cube 2 renderer.
• Built-in realtime map editor — the included WYSIWYG editor creates release-quality maps offline or cooperatively online with other players in edit mode, with no external tooling required.
• Game modes with mutators — the familiar arena and team modes are backed by a large array of mutators and server variables, so server operators can reshape the rules without touching the code.
• Moddable, one codebase — source, shell scripts and config files are open, maps and assets are share-alike, and a development build can be compiled from the Git repository for the bleeding edge.
• No accounts, no microtransactions — there is nothing to buy, no login, no advertising and no store; the download is the whole game.

Why Use Red Eclipse?

Arena shooters have largely moved behind accounts, battle passes and storefronts, and Red Eclipse is a pointed answer to that: a self-contained download that boots straight into a match. The parkour system gives it a character that straight Quake clones lack — learning to flow through a map is as important as aim, and the tweaked versions of the classic modes make that movement matter. Because everything is open, servers can be run and customised by anyone, balance and map pools evolve in public, and the community keeps the project alive more than a decade and a half after its first release. Be aware that Red Eclipse 2 raised the hardware bar: the Tesseract renderer wants a reasonably modern GPU (OpenGL 3.0 with GLSL 1.30 recommended), and anyone on old integrated graphics is pointed at the older version 1.6 release instead.

Use Cases

• LAN parties and casual online matches where nobody wants to create an account or download a launcher.
• Running a dedicated server with custom mutators, maps and match rules for a community.
• Practising multiplayer fundamentals — movement, map control and weapon timing — on your own or with friends.
• Building and sharing maps or total conversions on a fully open engine with an in-game editor.

Platform

Windows · Linux · BSD · macOS — standalone packages (Linux also gets an auto-updating AppImage) or free of charge on Steam

Licence

Open source — the source code, shell scripts and config files are released under the Zlib licence (as are the underlying Tesseract and Cube Engine 2). The bundled game content — maps, textures, sounds and models — is not covered by that licence and defaults to CC BY-SA 4.0 or later where a map’s own readme does not say otherwise. The included ENet library is MIT-style. Free to play, modify and redistribute.

Alternatives

• Xonotic — the other big free arena shooter, with a similar movement-driven feel and a fully open codebase
• OpenArena — Quake III Arena recreated with free and open assets if you want the classic mode set

Website

redeclipse.net — source code at github.com/redeclipse/base

Looking for more free games? Browse the Games directory.

Screenshot: Red Eclipse 2 (v2.0.0) gameplay — TucanHolmes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.