On March 6th of this year, FragPunk was released. As of March 24th, 74% of players on Steam rated their experience with the game to be positive. As a new addition to the hero shooter genre, I was skeptical that it would innovate as promised. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and Marvel Rivals (who, along with FragPunk, is published by NetEase) have both become very popular as of recently. This scared me as a consumer, as I was worried that FragPunk was a cash-in on the popular genre. The main game mode is a plant/attack versus defuse/defend, with each team of 5 getting a chance to play both sides. My experience was mostly positive, but let’s get some bad stuff out of the way first.
While FragPunk is developed by Bad Guitar Studio, it happens to be a subsidiary of NetEase. After searching for a website for Bad Guitar Studio, I could not find one. This seemed a little too strange to me, so I did some digging. Upon launching the game, any mention of NetEase seems to be hidden. After looking at NetEase’s site, I found many of their games are mobile titles, and they do list FragPunk. As a gamer and a consumer, this raised some red flags. Why try to hide the publisher? Why does the developing team not have a website? I wondered if NetEase was trying to distance themselves from the game, as to not associate it with mobile quality games. Strangely, a controversy led me to believe that while tightly bound to NetEase, Bad Guitar is a studio under their own control. GameRant reports that the official FragPunk account on X mocked another game studio upon their closure (they have apologized as of now). This move is not something I would imagine from a company with so much to lose as NetEase.
When I first launched the game, I was shocked at how much fun it was. I found the general gameplay to be a hybrid of Counter-Strike’s strategic yet fast tactics and Apex Legends’ arcade-y gunplay. Player health is just right; it gives you enough time to react to an ambush or a stacked enemy but also punishes players for being careless. Reload times seemed relatively long compared to other shooters, this can be devastating when facing the enemy team alone as secondary weapons are weak compared to primaries. The Game gives you a choice between a few different types of weapons. The sniper rifles can be dangerous, but I never encountered many players using them as players move fast and are hard to hit. Shotguns, on the other hand, seem disappointingly weak, and the lack of recoil on some weapons means you’re generally outranged. Melee weapons add a nice flair, but I’ll get to that soon. The characters all seem to play well, and I quickly found favorites. While the voice acting is cringey, the character abilities are pretty fun. While most abilities are some sort of trap or throwables, some characters can teleport or place turrets.
The main gimmick and innovation of FragPunk is the Shard Cards, these are effects that each team (of 5) gets to vote on at the beginning of each round. These Shard Cards can affect your team, the enemy team, or both. These range from simple effects like all of your ammo being in one magazine to the enemy team’s heads increasing in size or the round being melee only. These cards can combine in some pretty good ways. I played a round where my team voted for a card that made explosives increase in size as they traveled through the air and another card that increased their damage. I played another round where my team voted for a melee-only round that effectively wasted the other team’s cards. Overall, it’s a great system that adds a nice layer of replayability.
A big topic of discussion for this game is its microtransactions. While the shop is extensive, the game gives you lots of opportunities to earn rewards for free. From putting in some codes I found on the internet and a few days of playing, I earned rare weapon skins and recolor for my main (favorite character). As long as you don’t expect to be able to earn much of the premium currency or any fancy character skins, you likely won’t be disappointed. To contradict myself, I was disappointed in the stickers you could apply to the weapons. When you earn a new weapon sticker, it’s really difficult to pull any rare stickers from the “sticker packs”. To be frank, I don’t care much about cosmetics. The game is fun, and the free, “easy” to obtain skins are good enough for me.
Overall, I would rate the game a 7/10. The base game is fun, and the mechanics work well. There are plenty of microtransactions, but they are easy to ignore. The Shard Card system adds some nice replayability, and the characters are fun to play (if you can ignore the voice acting). I had fun and came back multiple times. It innovated quite a bit, something I hope more hero shooters do, but it was not revolutionary for the genre.
