Fakeout Game Modes: CTF vs Neutral Flag

CTF — Shellwork, Grease Trap, Tarpit Mid, Proving Ground, Deadbolt

The flagship mode. Two flags, one per team, sitting at each base. Seventeen CTF maps ship, every one playable in private rooms and against bots; online casual and ranked rotate through a smaller pick that changes over time. The founding five show the range: Shellwork (the perimeter walls behind each flag are bouncy, so bombs kicked at your own back wall carrom back), Grease Trap (oil chutes into a spike bank behind each flag), Tarpit Mid (a tar-ringed powerup nest in the middle), Proving Ground (zero surface hazards of any kind — no oil, tar, bounce, spikes, gates, or wells, just wall geometry and classic powerups, so nothing but your own driving decides it), and Deadbolt (each flag sits behind a gate whose button is flanked by spikes on both sides, with an ungated gap in the pocket’s far corner as the way past a held gate, plus Drop Bomb pickups that let either side wall off a corridor on the fly). The other twelve — Thicket, Redline, Tremor, Warp, Gambit, Portcullis, Foundry, Caltrop, Maelstrom, Apogee, Dyson, and Saltworks — are hand-designed Fakeout originals, each built around one signature element: gravity wells, a rail-lined boost spine, an erupting bomb fault, portal rotations, a spike-lined wager lane, gate-and-button doors, a bounce-walled furnace, spike gardens, a well spiral, an orbital giant, team-tile currents, and tar pans.

• Touch the enemy flag to pick it up and carry it.
• Carry it back to your own base and step onto your own endzone to capture — but only if your own flag is currently home. If the enemy has it, you have to wait for a teammate to return yours first.
• Get tagged by an enemy while carrying and you drop the flag where you popped. It waits there for either team to grab it again.
• The leader when the 6:00 clock runs out wins — a tie goes to golden cap, where the next capture wins outright. Open up a 3-capture lead at any point, though, and it's mercy: the match ends immediately.

Neutral Flag — thirteen maps, Lockup to Recoil

One yellow flag, sitting in the middle of the map instead of two team flags. Thirteen NF maps ship, all of them open in private rooms and bot matches, with online play rotating through a few at a time. The founding four: Lockup (each endzone is a vault behind a gate resting in its owner's colour — scorers flow straight through, defenders hold the button or pay the pop, and a return portal rides the scorer back out), Skate Park (an oil tunnel leading straight into each endzone, with bouncy tunnel walls turning a bad approach angle into a pinball ricochet), Cold Storage (each endzone sits at the back of a tar locker whose two-tile throat is diagonally opposite it, with frostbite pickups near mid), and Undertow (a chain of team-only speed pads lines each team's route home — a current that helps a carrier and does nothing for a chaser on the same tiles). The other nine are hand-designed Fakeout originals: Husk (a four-pillar shell around the flag, oil on both scoring runs), Backdraft (the flag inside a bounce-wall diamond — the grab itself is a deflect fight), Crescendo (a gravity-well field that thickens toward each endzone), Afterburn (speed pads chain the whole run, tar checks the last stretch), Yaw (team-tile currents chart each side's route home), Relic (an ancient gate on each endzone's short door, its button out in the field), Slipstream (portals are the rotation — jump to the mid flank or drop home to cut off a carrier), Overcast (drifting wall masses and spike hail, all short reads), and Recoil (bounce-wall bars angle the lanes — every run home plays off the cushions).

• Either team can grab it first.
• Tag the carrier and the flag transfers to you on the spot — no walking back to a drop point, no return trip. Possession changes mid-stride.
• You score by carrying it all the way to your own endzone, which on twelve of the thirteen maps sits deep in enemy territory — the run is longer and more contested than a CTF capture. (Lockup is the exception: its endzones are vaults on each team's own side, guarded by gates instead of distance.)
• Same 6:00 clock, and golden cap on a tie. Mercy is the one number that differs: Neutral Flag scores several times faster than CTF, so it takes a 6-capture lead to end an NF match early, not three.

Which should you play first?

CTF is the more familiar shape if you've played any capture-the-flag game before — two bases, two flags, clear offense and defense roles. Neutral Flag rewards more aggressive, opportunistic play, since a single well-timed tag can swing possession instantly rather than resetting it. Both play the same controls and the same movement model — the difference is entirely in the objective. Every arena has its own page with layout art and a strategy guide in the map index.

No health bars, no weapons

Neither mode has a shoot button or a damage number anywhere. A tag is binary — carrying or not, popped or not — and every fight comes down to positioning, timing, and momentum.