TRAFICO

My patience for unfinished multiplayer games ran out around the fourth time I queued into an empty server, and TRAFICO tests that patience hard. Released in January 2018 under a still-in-development notice that remains plastered on the store page years later, this is an open-world PvP shooter built around the cartel-versus-DEA fantasy, set in Peru, and priced firmly in the sub-five-dollar tier. That price context matters a lot here. The core mode is called Chaos, and it does what it says, loosely. Up to 100 players drop into a large open-world map set around Cerros, Peru, loot weapons scattered throughout the environment, and fight in either team-based or free-for-all configurations. You pick a side, Military DEA or cartel, and the game toggles between first and third-person perspective. On paper that is a reasonable scaffold for a budget shooter. In practice, the player pool is thin enough that you will frequently be staring at a lobby that never fills. No players, no netcode to evaluate, no time-to-kill to measure, nothing. That is the hard wall this game runs into immediately. The Battle Royale mode, accessible via a separate test-server component, was designed around 100-player dedicated servers with 128-tick and vehicle support including helicopters, tanks, and humvees. Again, compelling on paper. A 128-tick server in a sub-five-dollar indie shooter would be punching well above its weight class if those servers had a population. The trafficking mode that is central to the thematic hook of the game was listed as still in development at launch and has remained so. What you are actually buying in 2025 is a mostly empty shell of a concept, not a finished product. The 76% positive score from 13 Steam reviews tells you almost nothing statistically, but it does suggest the handful of people who got sessions going found something likeable in the chaos. Character customization starts with the DEA operative side, and the loot-the-environment weapon loop is functional. The setting, a Peruvian open world with a drug-war skin, is genuinely underused as a backdrop in the shooter genre and deserves a better execution than this one got. As a shooter specialist I need working lobbies, readable hit registration, and some evidence that the ranked or competitive side of a game has a pulse. TRAFICO has none of those things right now in any verifiable, consistent way. If you want the cartel-versus-law-enforcement shooter experience on PC, your time is better spent elsewhere. This one reads as a proof-of-concept that ran out of development steam before it found an audience. Fred, Scout Team