Warsow is a completely free fastpaced first-person shooter (FPS) set in a futuristic cartoon-like world.

Warsow is a multiplayer first-person shooter computer game first publicly released on June 8, 2005. The game is in active development.

Warsow’s codebase is free and open source software, distributed under the terms of the GPL; it is built upon Qfusion, an advanced modification of the Quake II engine.

The artwork and other media are licensed under the proprietary Warsow Content License, which allows the contributors of this media to use the work in a "personal portfolio" but not in any other game.

Warsow is loosely based on the E-novel Chasseur de bots by Fabrice Demurger.The novel is the basis of the game's cyberpunk visual style, which is achieved by combining cel-shaded cartoon-like graphics with dark, flashy and dirty textures. Since visual clarity is important in maintaining competitive gameplay, Warsow tries to keep effects minimalistic, clear and visible.

The very competitive gameplay of Warsow focuses heavily on movement and trickjumps. Many of the tricks in Warsow, which originate from the Quake series, include circle-jumping, bunny hopping, strafe-jumping, double jumping, ramp-sliding, and rocket jumping.
Warsow also gives players the ability to dash, dodge or wall jump, tricks that were originally possible in the Unreal series. It uses a separate button for most of the special movements, making it easier to use them while doing other things at the same time.

Warsow 0.5 Official Trailer video – Mod DB

The various movement tricks combine to add an extra dimension to the gameplay; as the player's proficiency at moving increases, they are able to collect health, armour and weapons more quickly, and to overpower less capable enemies. The variety and flexibility of the physics has spawned an entire community dedicated to competing on the various Race maps that the game offers.

Warsow also has a unique power-up system for weapons. In addition to regular ammunition, ammo boxes found on the map contain strong ammunition. Strong ammo either increases a weapon's power or modifies its behaviour to make it more effective.

Weapons are restricted to using strong ammunition until depleted, at which point it would switch back to using regular ammunition. Unlike Unreal, Warsow weapons do not have an "alternate fire" option (pressing a different button to use different attacks with the same weapon).
Firefox plugin.

One of the things I’ve been working on (and off!) in the past 6 months is a simple addon/plugin for Firefox, which allows you to embed a Warsow instance into a web page. I’ve never played QL myself but I guess it does something similar. Of course to be able to use this plugin, that is: to able to actually play, spectate matches and watch demos you need the game itself installed locally. Here’s a short preview of the plugin:

This is how the plugin is listed among other installed addons in your Firefox:


A simple web page that embeds a streamed demo (that’s another thing added to Warsow itself – it can now stream demos over HTTP without pre-downloading them first):

Hovering your mouse pointer over the play button actually highlights it:

Left mouse button menu:

Oops, looks like this is our first run of the plugin and we didn’t use the windows installer:

All is set up, the demo is now loading:

Yup, it’s running:

Console also works:


Screenshots.