The CTF shooter is making a comeback thanks to the manager and lead singer of Imagine Dragons, who 'grew up playing capture the flag in the woods at night with flashlights'

Capture the flag is my favorite shooter mode—shoutout to Quake 2 CTF—and who knew that I'd find kindred spirits in Mac and Dan Reynolds, respectively the manager and lead singer of pop rock band Imagine Dragons?

At Summer Game Fest today, the Reynolds (who are brothers) and their new studio Night Street Games announced Last Flag, a 5v5 CTF shooter that looks superficially a bit like Team Fortress 2, although it's third-person.

"Dan and I grew up playing capture the flag in the woods at night with flashlights, friends, and lots of adrenaline," says Mac Reynolds. "Last Flag is our attempt to honor the purity and magic of that hide and seek experience—brought to life by the incredible team of developers we're lucky enough to stand beside."

I got to play a few rounds of Last Flag in a recent media playtest. The third-person shooting wasn't quite my style, but the design of the mode is great.

At the start of a match, one player on each team is tasked with "hiding" their team's flag. On the map we played, that meant finding a spot anywhere within in a hilly region on my team's side of the map, which included a network of shallow mining tunnels.

When the game starts, both teams emerge from subterranean spawn bunkers and, rather than rushing immediately into each other's bases like in a game of Tribes, they collide at three capture points that form a line across the center of the map.

You can ignore these radar tower sub-objectives, but they're important: Once you capture a point, it provides passive healing, you can rapidly travel to it from your spawn, and best of all, it will gradually give you intel about the location of the enemy flag, eliminating regions on your team's minimap to show you where not to look.

As valuable as that intel is, I mostly opted to let my teammates fight in the center while I ran directly into enemy territory to manually search for the flag. Once you find it, even if you're immediately killed, it'll appear on your team's minimap, so the search is over. I imagine that, as players gain experience with the characters, their abilities, and the best tactics, it won't be so easy to saunter across the enemy border. One character has a recon bird for spotting enemies, and that could've stifled my infiltration.

Your next goal is (of course) to bring the enemy flag back to your base and plant it in a gazebo. There's another little twist on the CFT formula here: Rather than immediately scoring a point, you have to defend the planted flag from the other team for a brief period, giving them a chance to make a clutch save by breaking through your defenses.

One capture wins the match, so it's like you're always in sudden death overtime, although there is an actual OT mode that kicks in if the match runs long, tweaking the rules to encourage a speedy conclusion.

It's a great concept, but I wasn't as convinced by the movement and shooting. Part of that is just personal preference borne of all those Quake hours: I like first-person shooters. But I also found it somewhat frustrating to keep my sights on enemies who were flitting around my screen erratically thanks to their special movement abilities. I sensed at times that my difficulty tracking them was made worse by lag, which was perhaps just a symptom of the playtest environment.

I could also take or leave the '70s game show theme. It keeps showing up in games and I've got no particular love for the aesthetic, although the similarities to TF2 did bring back some fond memories. The soundtrack is said to feature "fuzzy guitars, analog synths, and legit 1970s studio magic, crafted with real vintage gear," and I've got no complaints about that aspect of the retro theme.

Last Flag is a promising game, and there's one more detail that I always like to hear: Night Street plans to release it as a paid game, with all characters and other content available to all players.

I'm not against the free-to-play model in general, but I do usually prefer the overall experience of competitive games which eschew it and don't have to be stuffed with roadblocks to encourage spending. Granted, there's nothing to stop paid games from also getting too into currencies and microtransactions, but Night Street is going with the phrase "everything included at launch," which sounds positive.

Last Flag will come to Steam and the Epic Games Store, and there are plans for an alpha later in 2025. I definitely recommend trying it out whenever testing goes public. I'm not sure it'll give Tribes fans the medicine they're looking for—I did wish I could ski down those hills, as I gotta go fast—but getting any kind of new CTF shooter here in 2025 is a happy thing to me.