Sizzling on the heels of the worldwide success of Marvel Rivals and with different fashionable live-service video games like Naraka: Bladepoint and As soon as Human underneath its belt, NetEase has turned its consideration to the hero shooter style with FragPunk. New inner growth workforce Dangerous Guitar Studio is made up of younger, hardcore FPS followers, and after becoming a member of them for a one-hour play session the place we tried a brand new character and map revealed completely on this preview, the workforce’s eye for element is obvious to see.
FragPunk’s important recreation mode is the 5v5 Shard Conflict mode. On its floor, this mode resembles your typical Overwatch-like hero shooter skirmish, nevertheless it additionally pulls from quite a lot of influences to combine up the gameplay. The rounds on this mode are nearer to the bomb-defusal targets of Counter Strike, with one workforce planting bombs at specified places and the opposite defending, with comparatively small arenas that preserve rounds tight and targeted.
As with every hero shooter, gamers can select from a choice of characters – named Lancers – who every have a choice of distinctive abilities, that means lots to study by way of particular person character preferences and workforce make-up. For our session, we tried the newly unveiled character Chum, a stone robotic who’s accompanied by a mechanical pet angler fish named Chomper. Along with utilizing the sport’s arsenal of satisfying weapons, Chum can toss projectiles much like sticky mines and smoke grenades, in addition to sending Chomper out as help. Chomper can monitor and chew enemies for a number of low-damage assaults, basically like a strolling turret, or may be modified with pet treats that make it explode on contact or path a thick smokescreen in its wake, including a number of strategic layers that felt enjoyable to combine up.
And being product of stone, Chum can be a powerful defence character, making him a terrific all-round choice for newcomers.
Many different Lancer talents usually are not solely offensive however defensive or tactical – partitions for canopy, traps, velocity boosts, abilities that spotlight enemies on the map, and so forth. We tried a number of Lancers, and located a assorted impact on gameplay. Utilizing Nitro, together with her directly-controllable four-legged drone and gun turrets, we had been in a position to rack up a number of assists; whereas Axon was one other favorite due to his extra aggressive choice of abilities, together with projectile bombs and a cool guitar-gun. Within the Lancer choice display, you’ll be able to watch a brief video clip for every capability that can assist you shortly grasp what they do.
However what actually units FragPunk aside is its Shard Playing cards system. Initially of every spherical, every workforce is randomly assigned a set of three playing cards, which they’ll swap out and in, every of which adjustments the principles of the spherical on your whole workforce. Some are easy stat proportion boosts or buffs, whereas others do issues like rising the scale of your enemies’ heads, reducing your individual or equipping helmets, affecting the issue of headshots for that spherical. Others nonetheless are rather more uncommon, and utterly change the gameplay.
For instance, one Shard Card gave our workforce a type of proximity detector in order that we obtained an aural and visible sign every time an enemy was close by, whereas one other slowly regenerated our well being gauge, each of which gave us a welcome benefit. Some playing cards have an effect on the surroundings, reminiscent of shrouding the map in fog that provides rigidity as enemies are tougher to identify. Others have energetic results – press the Z key to swap well being bars with an enemy, or to swap gear with them, or to leap right into a parallel world the place you’ll be able to basically run unseen to a brand new location after which pop again into the combat to ambush your foes.
It’s lots to soak up. You solely have round 30 seconds to finalise your hand for every spherical, and at first every of the 150+ playing cards will probably be new to you. “We intentionally made the rule for every card so simple as attainable in order that they are often fast to grasp,” Inventive Director Xin Chang informed us. “We additionally made the outline textual content for every card as brief as attainable, and used visible design to make its results extra apparent.”
After a number of rounds, the Shard Playing cards system started to make sense, and actually paid off by way of making every spherical really feel completely different. We had been pressured to have interaction in a different way with each spherical, rethinking methods and responding not solely to our workforce’s present hand but additionally the enemy workforce’s.
Apparently, the ruleset-shuffling Shard Playing cards had been impressed not solely by different videogames, but additionally by sports activities. The event workforce’s constructing has a big gymnasium with services for actions reminiscent of basketball, desk tennis and badminton, its partitions adorned with photographs of the builders in competitors.
Chang defined, “I play soccer and basketball, so I like video games with a two-team system. I additionally watch quite a lot of NBA, and so they usually make adjustments to the principles to maintain the game fascinating. Based mostly on that concept, I additionally wished to have a system of tweaking the principles in our recreation.”
Sports activities additionally influenced the workforce’s strategy to FragPunk’s maps. Stage Designer An Yuan added, “In degree design, we divide the map into areas which might be good for assault or defence phases, in order that the participant has to maintain shifting. It’s type of like basketball, the place you could have completely different spatial design across the courtroom that fits the completely different roles of the gamers. We utilized that idea in our recreation, and likewise within the Shard Playing cards, which may flip an excellent hiding place into a nasty one.”
FragPunk additionally encompasses a Duel mode. When a match ends in a tie, it adjustments to a one-on-one showdown, a bit bit just like the mano a mano face-offs in Name of Obligation: Warzone’s Gulag, however impressed by soccer’s penalty shootouts. Every participant takes their flip within the queue for a collection of brief and sharp winner-stays-on rounds in small however vertically layered arenas. With all our teammates spectating throughout our flip, we completely felt the strain, making for a enjoyable and completely different tie-breaker mini-game. It’s so cool, the devs even added it as a separate standalone mode known as Duel Grasp.
Every map has interactive gimmicks that gamers can use strategically to realize the higher hand. First, we tried the newly unveiled map Dongtian. That is the Hangzhou, China-based dev workforce’s stab at an Asian-flavoured map, and its two bomb websites may be rotated by gamers for tactical benefit. When the change in the course of the map is activated by a participant, the core cowl on the bomb web site rotates, altering methods for each the offensive and defensive groups.
“We need to use these rotating partitions to change the sting between the assault workforce and the defence workforce,” defined Yuan. “So we encourage gamers to combat for that core space to take care of their edge or get the sting for themselves.”
Different maps have their very own gimmicks – BlackMarket’s manually managed bridge permits gamers to alter the map’s structure and even pull the bottom from underneath their opponents’ ft; Akhet has an underground river that permits sneaky gamers to maneuver immediately from the center space to a bomb web site; and Tundra has magic portals that immediately zap gamers between gates to outmanoeuvre the opposite workforce. It was enjoyable to discover these maps, and clearly gamers who take the time to study them correctly will achieve a bonus.
Dongtian is the house setting for the Lancer Kismet. Narrative Director Wenhe Fu defined, “The sport has a multiverse idea, which permits us to have every character come from fairly a distinct universe. We’ll take a while in future phases to introduce these background particulars to gamers.”
Constructed right into a mountain and dotted with historical picket temple buildings, mystical statues and wizened timber with gracefully warped trunks, Dongtian’s Jap aesthetic brings a wise visible twist to FragPunks’ vibrant world.
Artwork Director Yiming Li informed us, “We wished to mix historical buildings that seem like they may come from China with near-future science and know-how parts, in addition to some spiritual parts. Whereas every map could have its personal distinctive cultural options, we would like all of them to suit into the sport’s total sci-fi feeling. It’s like in Star Wars: Every of the civilisations are very completely different, however when they’re considered as a complete, in addition they exist underneath a harmonious sci-fi setting.”
And that brings us to FragPunk’s visuals. This can be a actually beautiful recreation. The punk-influenced and sci-fi-tinged fluorescent aesthetic is wealthy and interesting, and its kill animations are punctuated by dazzling bursts of color. Its maps are extraordinarily readable, and participant characters pop, making it simple to comply with the motion. Even its menus are fairly to have a look at, with the flashy presentation you’d anticipate from a Persona recreation or Road Fighter 6, with daring layouts accented by graffiti scribbles. It actually stands out within the hero shooter house.
FragPunk will probably be free to play, with a small choice of Lancers accessible firstly in order that gamers can study them progressively, unlocking extra as they undergo in-game forex accrued by means of play or paid microtransactions. Different non-obligatory purchases will probably be strictly beauty. We’ll have to attend till launch to see how the service aspect pans out – different NetEase video games like Marvel Rivals and Naraka: Bladepoint have seen complaints about pricing, however that apart they’ve managed to maintain gamers happy, so hopefully that’s an excellent signal.
Along with the Shard Conflict and Duel modes we tried, FragPunk will function a mixture of modes at or after launch which might be focused at each hardcore and informal gamers, together with one the place all gamers are pressured to make use of the identical Lancer, or melee weapons solely, and so forth. The event workforce is seemingly largely made up of pro-level gamers, nevertheless it’s clear they’ve additionally taken steps to make the sport accessible to newbies and even streamers and their viewers.