With all the trailers, showcases, and dev diaries that can lead up to a game’s launch nowadays, it’s harder than ever for one to be a real surprise – and that’s especially true of a multiplayer first-person shooter when, like me, you are a Certified Old Gamer™ who’s been playing them since the genre began. Yet FragPunk has done just that. What I worried might end up being a Valorant clone with a card gimmick and a big list of other buzzword features has instead impressed me with how fresh it all feels. That said, a messy mishmash of in-game currencies and rewards hurts the fun that can come from leveling up and chasing cosmetics.
In many ways, FragPunk reminds me of a reverse Ship of Theseus. If every component of a game came from somewhere else, does it eventually become something original? It’s hard to say, but the result here is quite amusing regardless. Like Overwatch, it has very distinct characters with big personalities and unique tools to match them. Like Valorant or Counter-Strike, the primary game mode, called Shard Clash, revolves around teams of five competing to plant or defuse a Converter (aka bomb) or eliminate one another across multiple rounds. And like Fortnite, it has a deep bag of cosmetic items like costumes, weapon skins, stickers, and emotes to entice you to spend some money on this otherwise free-to-play shooter.
FragPunk’s playable characters are called Lancers, and they are an entertaining group to choose from. Some are relatively typical archetypes, like a sniper named Hollowpoint and her abilities that help reveal enemies. Others are way out there, like the punk rocker Axon, who shoots lightning from his guitar. Unlike Valorant, where abilities can give you an edge but are rarely what win a fight, Fragpunk places a much bigger emphasis on using them to dominate the map, which I like. When abilities like Broker’s rocket launcher can instantly erase someone, it feels good to use it yourself or devise a counter on the fly as you see it coming, like throwing down a shield wall as Nitro to provide cover and then returning fire from a remote controlled combat drone.
Naturally, Fragpunk isn’t all lightning guitars and rockets. Your standard assortment of shotguns, SMGs, assault rifles, and more forms the backbone of combat. I don’t mind that the guns really aren’t the star of the show here, but I do wish there was more variety to choose from. There are two options in each category you can select as your primary weapon, and they all shoot pretty much exactly how you’d expect. But the gunplay is at least smooth and responsive, and the fast time-to-kill does a good job of emphasizing the importance of positioning over raw gun skill.
The other aspect of shooting that stands out is how little movement affects your aim. Unlike Valorant, where stopping and popping is often essential if you want to be accurate, Fragpunk fully embraces running and gunning. I found myself repeatedly lagging behind my squad in kill count until a teammate pointed out that I’m better off treating gunfights like Call of Duty with powers – advice that put me right at the top of the next match’s leaderboard. That style of shooting isn’t necessarily better or worse than the more deliberate action of other games, but it does stick out as atypical for an objective-based tactical shooter in a way that’s a perfect fit with the general FragPunk vibe.
The real star of the show is the Shard Card system. Before every round, each team has three random cards pulled that players can then put Shard Points into, effectively voting on which ones will be active. The costs of their effects vary, and you earn more Shard Points either by getting kills or picking them up off the ground mid-round. Some Shard Cards are simple, like one that increases your movement speed, while others are extremely powerful, like another that forces the next round to play out as a melee battle – or one called Big Heads, which (as advertised) gives the entire enemy team overgrown, easy-to-hit craniums. A few are even downright weird, like Egg King, which causes everyone to lay an egg after crouching for 10 seconds, which you can then eat to regain health. It’s hilarious, utterly bizarre, and unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a shooter before.
I’m surprised by how much I enjoy the card-collecting aspect of FragPunk. You start with access to less than a third of the 169 total Shard Cards that are currently available, and you can earn more after completing matches. Getting more matters, as the cards that are randomly selected before each round are based on what each team member has unlocked. It’s pretty exciting getting a new card and reading what weirdness it’s going to introduce. I also appreciate that you can easily see your collection, read the effect, and, in some cases, watch a quick video showing you exactly what it does.
Rounds of Shard Clash go by fast – possibly too fast. In theory, one team is trying to plant the Converter on one of two objective points, which the other team would then need to defuse… but in practice, the overwhelming majority of rounds end when one team wipes out the other, often in just a few minutes. That means that matches rarely have the same sort of strategic back and forth that makes hard-fought games of something like Valorant so engaging. It also means that Lancers with abilities that have more of a nuanced, tactical focus have seemed less viable overall. I’d love to hunker down with Nito’s turrets and drone to hold a point, but so far that’s just a recipe to have all the action happen elsewhere. Hopefully some balance tweaks will arrive to make the objectives a more relevant part of the action.
A match ends when one team wins four total rounds, but if both teams reach three wins before that happens, it activates one of my favorite twists: Duels. This has each team face off in a series of 1v1 fights in a small arena, and whoever survives sticks around to face the other team’s next champion until every member of one has been eliminated. Health and abilities don’t regenerate round to round, which makes it tough for one great player to run the table. The action is as exciting as it is tense, and spectating while you root on your teammate and wait for your own turn is thrilling, especially when you get the win that clinches the Duel and, by extension, the entire match for your team.
Ranked competition isn’t available until you reach level to 30, which can potentially take up to 10 hours. That’s a little on the long side, and I was pretty done with no-stakes matches well before I was able to start playing for rank. Shard Clash is the same in ranked, apart from the fact that you are now playing to six wins rather than four, but the random element of the Shard Cards might be a little too random in this context. It’s tough to be fighting with actual stakes and feel like bad draws are costing you wins. There’s an advanced version of Shard Clash you get access to once you reach Diamond rank that gives teams some control over selecting and banning cards to mitigate that, but I can’t help but feel like it should be the default for ranked competition across the board.
A few other modes add some variety, though none stand out. Simple Deathmatch is nice for shooting practice, and Duel Master is a similarly good gametype to train for those one-on-ones, though it not being the finale of a long match takes a lot of the drama out of it. Outbreak is the most interesting option: Like Halo’s Infection playlist, most players start with weapons while a few turn into Zombies, and everyone who is killed turns and starts hunting the survivors. Unfortunately the matches are much too long, and the mix of zombies with too much health and guns that slow them down tends to make fights frustrating for both sides.
Like so many free-to-play games, FragPunk relies on incentivising people to spend money on things like cosmetics as a source of revenue, rather than game sales. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that model, and it can even be a fun motivator if there are cool things to chase. Here, however, the cosmetic hunt suffers from a mixture of being too complex without having a lot of enticing options that make it feel worth investing in.
There are way too many different currencies. There is Gold, which you use to buy items and new Lancers, and there’s Glunite, which also buys items – those are both earned largely through playing matches and progressing along the battle pass. Then you can buy FragPunk Coins, which cost real money and are also used to unlock characters and items. If you buy into the premium version of the battle pass for 900 FragPunk Coins, which will cost you around $10USD, you’ll earn Battle Pass Tokens to spend on a different set of cosmetics. Meanwhile, playing ranked matches will get you Ranking Coins, which let you pick from an exclusive pool of weapon skins. That’s not to be confused with the Membership Pick, obviously, which you cash in for weapon skins from a different pool. And, of course, if you or create an in-game Club, you can get Club Supplies. These are all spent on basically the same types of things, but from separate catalogs, which creates unnecessary confusion with no benefit to you as a player.
It’s a mess, and that’s without including the additional currencies that will presumably rotate in and out for special events. It’s too scattered, and way too much to keep track of. It’s also hard to feel any interest in figuring it all out when most of the prizes aren’t very appealing. None of the additional skins stand out the way the best options in Marvel Rivels do, for example. Many of the things Gold (the currency you earn the most of) gets you are random pulls for small touches like gun stickers. The most valuable thing Gold can buy, the Lancers, are prohibitively expensive, resulting in a far too coercive push towards spending real money to buy new characters outright – when it took me 10 hours to unlock a single Lancer, that $10 price tag starts to look less like a suggestion.
Even the battle pass, a staple of games like this, misses the mark. There are very few rewards on the free tier of the 60-level pass, and they consist primarily of stickers, icons for your profile, and pop cans that give out random rewards. Paying for the premium tier gives you access to many more prizes, including several bland character and weapons skins… but there’s also an Ultimate level on top of that, which adds very little other than doubling a few of the random pull rewards, two weapon skins, and one Lancer skin. That seems absurd given the Ultimate Pass is more than double the cost of the premium version at a whopping 2500 FragPunk Coins, or around $25.
