If not for NetEase’s recent success with Marvel Rivals, I’d consider them brave to put another hero shooter out so soon after the spectacular train-wreck (well, mildly intriguing tram-shunt) that was Sony’s Concord. The genre is all but awaiting a gravestone in 2025, and yet here we are with Fragpunk, a new PvP FPS from developer Bad Guitar, which is doing fairly well despite being not that different from anything else – Concord included.
As soon as the logo splash faded into a high-octane CGI mess of colour and explosions and out-of-context character moments that had all the impact on me of a reheated Chinese takeaway at 9 in the morning, I knew what I was in for. I rolled my eyes, then rolled them again when I was met with the roster of heroes consisting of the usual selection of girls in tight trousers, girls in tight tops, men in baggy trousers, and men in no tops, with a few weird cyberpunk-y people thrown in so there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Fragpunk is Fun with a capital FUN.
And yet it wasn’t long before I found myself forgetting that I’d played this multiple times before, because despite its absolute best efforts to turn me off, Fragpunk instead got me by the goolies pretty quickly.
It’s no revelation. We should get that out of the way right at the start. It’s more of an iteration, and if I were to play any amount of the minute-to-minute gameplay alongside things like Overwatch, Apex Legends, or Valorant, I doubt I could tell which was which, but Fragpunk does have an ace up its sleeve that keeps things fresh for at least a while.
The Shard Card is close to actual genius, and makes you wonder if they came up with it when someone spilled coffee on the dev tools and rolled with it. Essentially, each of the 160+ cards available unlocks some buff, debuff, weird effect, or special ability for the team, and the ability to mix and match them from random hands throughout a match means you genuinely don’t know what you’re going to get from one match to the next.
The first example that springs to mind is the big head card. Remember that silly visual effect popularised in Golden Eye ‘64 and aped by multiple shooters created since that glorious utopian era of gaming history? Well it’s here, and activated by a Shard Card along with other random effects like being able to lie down and nap to heal mid-fight (seriously, this exists). In fact, there’s even a card that heals you for doing squats.
But while you’re busy getting your cardio in and laying eggs you can eat for a health boost (I’m not making this up) remember that your enemy has similar options. Getting hit and unexpectedly teleported back to a spawn point is never fun, although it can save your life if it doesn’t kill you outright or steal your HP to heal the enemy.
The Shard Cards are more than just window dressing, though. They transform Fragpunk from just another shooter into something that feels almost endlessly creative and interesting, breaking the game in deliberate and noticeable ways. Balance is out the window, but no one seems to mind. Without the Cards it’s as standard as they come, offering only a few modes with the main one being a rather uninspired “Plant the Bomb/Defuse the Bomb” affair.
Player characters, or Lancers, also run the gamut of “We’ve seen this before” to “We’ve seen this before but in magenta and teal”. You’ve got a fire guy and a sand chick, some can drop turrets, teleport, turn invisible, or wield the power to, er, make things explode. It’s not that their powers or designs aren’t creative; it’s just that we’ve seen it all before in magenta, teal, and pretty much every other colour. Thrown together with the Shard Cards though, they become something more. There are cards that straight-up cancel or enhance specific Lancer powers, which adds a whole new dynamic to events.
While you’ll collect a number of different currencies with which to unlock character skins and decals for your guns, the actual in-game economy is interesting. Rather than buy guns at the start of a round or match, you can equip whatever you have unlocked, but you’ll get limited uses, which decrease every time you die. So if you have a favourite gun, you might not be able to use it for the whole match.
What Fragpunk lacks in subtlety it makes up for with a lack of subtlety. It’s loud and brash and silly and deliberately off-kilter, and that not only makes it fun, but fresh too. Yes certain elements are so overdone by now that they’re hardly worth getting off the loo for, but everything is forgiven thanks to the tremendous Shard Card system and, of course, how it feels to play. The minute-to-minute gunplay is smooth and satisfying, while powers vary enough to make it worth trying as many characters as you can unlock. But the variety makes the game, and with the Shard Cards Bad Guitar has created a system that they can potentially build on for a long time to come.
