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My kids play it a lot. They love that game. I don't see any use for it for an adult to play however. The kids do get frustrated though, because it's near impossible to complete a level in the time alloted and catch all those fish!

I can tell you about Sauerbraten's single player, which isn't spectacular.

It features a mode that involves getting through a map on a certain route and come out alive. I would compare it with the 1st Quake single player in terms of gameplay. It has switches and hidden areas and monsters that react to triggers, but it's seriously impaired by the lack of advanced machinery that appeared in Quake2 (lifts, advanced doors, complex switches and triggers, and so on), plus its limited to a small set of enemies, a set of Quake skins that were in the public domain, albeit of exquisite quality.

Except the AI is quite dumb (forgets about you once you're out of sight and won't follow around more than one corner). It's very simple to stand on a ledge out of the line of fire, wait for them to gather at the foot of the ledge like sheep and then safely rain rockets or grenades on them. You need a convoluted map to make them avoid this behaviour, but then it means they'll get blocked in some nooks and crannies and you have to look for them. And sometimes, if the map has open edges, they'll fall outside but not quite die, so they're out of reach and you can't finish the levels.

True, the Sauerbraten team focuses on good looking maps and multiplayer rather than single player. Most FPS's do that.

I don't want to diss their work, the maps are superb and I very much enjoy playing multiplayer. Bot deathmatch is ok too, once I've added skins and weapons from Doom and play at high levels in closed maps so they can give me a fair fight, if only in terms of sheer numbers. But indeed, there's no much of a storyline. I heard they're working on a RPG mod, perhaps that will work out better.

Having a "story mode" usually increases the production time of a game project, and is usually out of financial reach for these types of games. You need writers, voice actors, animators specialized in cut-scene animations. It's also not in the spirit of most of these games, which are meant for high replayability and online competition.

Not to say that it's impossible, but it's rare.