ENTERTAINMENT

Hot on the heels of the global success of Marvel Rivals and with other popular live-service games like Naraka: Bladepoint and Once Human under its belt, NetEase has turned its attention to the hero shooter genre with FragPunk. New internal development team Bad Guitar Studio is made up of young, hardcore FPS fans, and after joining them for a one-hour play session where we tried a new character and map revealed exclusively in this preview, the team’s eye for detail is clear to see.

FragPunk’s main game mode is the 5v5 Shard Clash mode. On its surface, this mode resembles your typical Overwatch-like hero shooter skirmish, but it also pulls from a variety of influences to mix up the gameplay. The rounds in this mode are closer to the bomb-defusal objectives of Counter Strike, with one team planting bombs at specified locations and the other defending, with relatively small arenas that keep rounds tight and focused.

As with any hero shooter, players can choose from a selection of characters – named Lancers – who each have a selection of unique skills, meaning plenty to learn in terms of individual character preferences and team makeup. For our session, we tried the newly unveiled character Chum, a stone robot who is accompanied by a mechanical pet angler fish named Chomper. In addition to using the game’s arsenal of satisfying guns, Chum can toss projectiles similar to sticky mines and smoke grenades, as well as sending Chomper out as support. Chomper can track and bite enemies for multiple low-damage attacks, essentially like a walking turret, or can be modified with pet treats that make it explode on contact or trail a thick smokescreen in its wake, adding several strategic layers that felt fun to mix up.

And being made of stone, Chum is also a strong defence character, making him a great all-round option for newcomers.

Many other Lancer abilities are not only offensive but defensive or tactical – walls for cover, traps, speed boosts, skills that highlight enemies on the map, and so on. We tried several Lancers, and found a varied effect on gameplay. Using Nitro, with her directly-controllable four-legged drone and gun turrets, we were able to rack up multiple assists; while Axon was another favourite thanks to his more aggressive selection of skills, including projectile bombs and a cool guitar-gun. In the Lancer selection screen, you can watch a short video clip for each ability to help you quickly grasp what they do.

But what really sets FragPunk apart is its Shard Cards system. At the start of each round, each team is randomly assigned a set of three cards, which they can swap in and out, each of which changes the rules of the round for your entire team. Some are simple stat percentage boosts or buffs, while others do things like increasing the size of your enemies’ heads, decreasing your own or equipping helmets, affecting the difficulty of headshots for that round. Others still are much more unusual, and completely change the gameplay.

For example, one Shard Card gave our team a kind of proximity detector so that we got an aural and visual signal whenever an enemy was nearby, while another slowly regenerated our health gauge, both of which gave us a welcome advantage. Some cards affect the environment, such as shrouding the map in fog that adds tension as enemies are harder to spot. Others have active effects – press the Z key to swap health bars with an enemy, or to swap gear with them, or to jump into a parallel world where you can essentially run unseen to a new location and then pop back into the fight to ambush your foes.

It’s a lot to take in. You only have around 30 seconds to finalise your hand for each round, and at first each of the 150+ cards will be new to you. “We deliberately made the rule for each card as simple as possible so that they can be quick to understand,” Creative Director Xin Chang told us. “We also made the description text for each card as short as possible, and used visual design to make its effects more obvious.”

After a few rounds, the Shard Cards system began to make sense, and really paid off in terms of making each round feel different. We were forced to engage differently with every round, rethinking strategies and responding not only to our team’s current hand but also the enemy team’s.

Interestingly, the ruleset-shuffling Shard Cards were inspired not only by other videogames, but also by sports. The development team’s building has a large gymnasium with facilities for activities such as basketball, table tennis and badminton, its walls adorned with photos of the developers in competition.

Chang explained, “I play soccer and basketball, so I like games with a two-team system. I also watch a lot of NBA, and they often make changes to the rules to keep the sport interesting. Based on that idea, I also wanted to have a system of tweaking the rules in our game.”

Sports also influenced the team’s approach to FragPunk’s maps. Level Designer An Yuan added, “In level design, we divide the map into areas that are good for attack or defence phases, so that the player has to keep moving. It’s kind of like basketball, where you have different spatial design around the court that suits the different roles of the players. We applied that concept in our game, and also in the Shard Cards, which can turn a good hiding place into a bad one.”

FragPunk also features a Duel mode. When a match ends in a tie, it changes to a one-on-one showdown, a little bit like the mano a mano face-offs in Call of Duty: Warzone’s Gulag, but inspired by soccer’s penalty shootouts. Each player takes their turn in the queue for a series of short and sharp winner-stays-on rounds in small but vertically layered arenas. With all our teammates spectating during our turn, we totally felt the pressure, making for a fun and different tie-breaker mini-game. It’s so cool, the devs even added it as a separate standalone mode called Duel Master.

Each map has interactive gimmicks that players can use strategically to gain the upper hand. First, we tried the newly unveiled map Dongtian. This is the Hangzhou, China-based dev team’s stab at an Asian-flavoured map, and its two bomb sites can be rotated by players for tactical advantage. When the switch in the middle of the map is activated by a player, the core cover at the bomb site rotates, altering strategies for both the offensive and defensive teams.

“We want to use these rotating walls to switch the edge between the attack team and the defence team,” explained Yuan. “So we encourage players to fight for that core area to maintain their edge or get the edge for themselves.”

Other maps have their own gimmicks – BlackMarket’s manually controlled bridge allows players to change the map’s layout and even pull the ground from under their opponents’ feet; Akhet has an underground river that allows sneaky players to move directly from the middle area to a bomb site; and Tundra has magic portals that instantly zap players between gates to outmanoeuvre the other team. It was fun to explore these maps, and clearly players who take the time to learn them properly will gain an advantage.

Dongtian is the home setting for the Lancer Kismet. Narrative Director Wenhe Fu explained, “The game has a multiverse concept, which allows us to have each character come from quite a different universe. We’ll take some time in future phases to introduce those background details to players.”

Built into a mountain and dotted with ancient wooden temple buildings, mystical statues and wizened trees with gracefully warped trunks, Dongtian’s Eastern aesthetic brings a smart visual twist to FragPunks’ colourful world.

Art Director Yiming Li told us, “We wanted to blend ancient buildings that look like they could come from China with near-future science and technology elements, as well as some religious elements. While each map will have its own distinctive cultural features, we want them all to fit into the game’s overall sci-fi feeling. It’s like in Star Wars: Each of the civilisations are very different, but when they are viewed as a whole, they also exist under a harmonious sci-fi setting.”

And that brings us to FragPunk’s visuals. This is a really gorgeous game. The punk-influenced and sci-fi-tinged fluorescent aesthetic is rich and appealing, and its kill animations are punctuated by dazzling bursts of colour. Its maps are extremely readable, and player characters pop, making it easy to follow the action. Even its menus are pretty to look at, with the flashy presentation you’d expect from a Persona game or Street Fighter 6, with bold layouts accented by graffiti scribbles. It really stands out in the hero shooter space.

FragPunk will be free to play, with a small selection of Lancers available at the start so that players can learn them gradually, unlocking more as they go through in-game currency accrued through play or paid microtransactions. Other optional purchases will be strictly cosmetic. We’ll have to wait until launch to see how the service side pans out – other NetEase games like Marvel Rivals and Naraka: Bladepoint have seen complaints about pricing, but that aside they have managed to keep players satisfied, so hopefully that’s a good sign.

In addition to the Shard Clash and Duel modes we tried, FragPunk will feature a mix of modes at or after launch that are targeted at both hardcore and casual players, including one where all players are forced to use the same Lancer, or melee weapons only, and so on. The development team is apparently largely made up of pro-level players, but it’s clear they have also taken steps to make the game accessible to newbies and even streamers and their viewers.

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