Scorching on the heels of the worldwide success of Marvel Rivals and with different common live-service video games like Naraka: Bladepoint and As soon as Human beneath its belt, NetEase has turned its consideration to the hero shooter style with FragPunk. New inside growth group 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 solely on this preview, the group’s eye for element is evident to see.
FragPunk’s foremost 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 group planting bombs at specified areas and the opposite defending, with comparatively small arenas that maintain rounds tight and centered.
As with every hero shooter, gamers can select from a number of characters – named Lancers – who every have a number of distinctive expertise, that means lots to study by way of particular person character preferences and group 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 just like sticky mines and smoke grenades, in addition to sending Chomper out as help. Chomper can observe and chew enemies for a number of low-damage assaults, primarily like a strolling turret, or will 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 manufactured from stone, Chum can be a robust defence character, making him an incredible all-round choice for newcomers.
Many different Lancer talents usually are not solely offensive however defensive or tactical – partitions for canopy, traps, velocity boosts, expertise that spotlight enemies on the map, and so forth. We tried a number of Lancers, and located a diverse impact on gameplay. Utilizing Nitro, along 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 number of expertise, together with projectile bombs and a cool guitar-gun. Within the Lancer choice display screen, you possibly can watch a brief video clip for every capacity that will help you rapidly grasp what they do.
However what actually units FragPunk aside is its Shard Playing cards system. In the beginning of every spherical, every group 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 to your complete group. Some are easy stat proportion boosts or buffs, whereas others do issues like growing the dimensions of your enemies’ heads, reducing your personal or equipping helmets, affecting the problem of headshots for that spherical. Others nonetheless are rather more uncommon, and utterly change the gameplay.
For instance, one Shard Card gave our group a form 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, comparable to shrouding the map in fog that provides stress as enemies are tougher to identify. Others have lively 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 possibly can primarily run unseen to a brand new location after which pop again into the battle to ambush your foes.
It’s rather a lot to absorb. You solely have round 30 seconds to finalise your hand for every spherical, and at first every of the 150+ playing cards shall be new to you. “We intentionally made the rule for every card so simple as attainable in order that they are often fast to know,” Inventive Director Xin Chang instructed 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 just a few rounds, the Shard Playing cards system started to make sense, and actually paid off by way of making every spherical really feel totally different. We had been pressured to have interaction in another way with each spherical, rethinking methods and responding not solely to our group’s present hand but in addition the enemy group’s.
Apparently, the ruleset-shuffling Shard Playing cards had been impressed not solely by different videogames, but in addition by sports activities. The event group’s constructing has a big gymnasium with services for actions comparable to basketball, desk tennis and badminton, its partitions adorned with images 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 a whole lot of NBA, they usually usually make adjustments to the principles to maintain the game fascinating. Based mostly on that concept, I additionally needed to have a system of tweaking the principles in our recreation.”
Sports activities additionally influenced the group’s strategy to FragPunk’s maps. Degree Designer An Yuan added, “In stage design, we divide the map into areas which are good for assault or defence phases, in order that the participant has to maintain transferring. It’s form of like basketball, the place you may have totally different spatial design across the court docket that fits the totally different roles of the gamers. We utilized that idea in our recreation, and likewise within the Shard Playing cards, which may flip a superb 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, just a little 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 sequence 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 totally different tie-breaker mini-game. It’s so cool, the devs even added it as a separate standalone mode referred to 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 group’s stab at an Asian-flavoured map, and its two bomb websites will be rotated by gamers for tactical benefit. When the change in the midst of the map is activated by a participant, the core cowl on the bomb website rotates, altering methods for each the offensive and defensive groups.
“We need to use these rotating partitions to modify the sting between the assault group and the defence group,” defined Yuan. “So we encourage gamers to battle 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 vary the map’s structure and even pull the bottom from beneath their opponents’ ft; Akhet has an underground river that permits sneaky gamers to maneuver straight from the center space to a bomb website; and Tundra has magic portals that immediately zap gamers between gates to outmanoeuvre the opposite group. It was enjoyable to discover these maps, and clearly gamers who take the time to study them correctly will acquire 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 unique universe. We’ll take a while in future phases to introduce these background particulars to gamers.”
Constructed right into a mountain and dotted with historic picket temple buildings, mystical statues and wizened bushes with gracefully warped trunks, Dongtian’s Jap aesthetic brings a wise visible twist to FragPunks’ vibrant world.
Artwork Director Yiming Li instructed us, “We needed to mix historic buildings that appear like they might come from China with near-future science and expertise parts, in addition to some non secular parts. Whereas every map can have its personal distinctive cultural options, we wish 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 totally different, however when they’re seen as a complete, in addition they exist beneath a harmonious sci-fi setting.”
And that brings us to FragPunk’s visuals. It is 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 straightforward to comply with the motion. Even its menus are fairly to take a look at, with the flashy presentation you’d count on from a Persona recreation or Avenue Fighter 6, with daring layouts accented by graffiti scribbles. It actually stands out within the hero shooter area.
FragPunk shall be free to play, with a small number of Lancers out there at first in order that gamers can study them step by step, unlocking extra as they undergo in-game forex accrued by means of play or paid microtransactions. Different non-compulsory purchases shall be strictly beauty. We’ll have to attend till launch to see how the service facet 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 a superb signal.
Along with the Shard Conflict and Duel modes we tried, FragPunk will characteristic a mixture of modes at or after launch which are 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 group 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.
