FragPunk Preview: Unique Palms-on with New Character Chum and Dongtian Map

Scorching on the heels of the worldwide success of Marvel Rivals and with different well-liked live-service video games like Naraka: Bladepoint and As soon as Human below its belt, NetEase has turned its consideration to the hero shooter style with FragPunk. New inner growth crew 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 crew’s eye for element is obvious to see.

FragPunk’s most important recreation mode is the 5v5 Shard Conflict mode. On its floor, this mode resembles your typical Overwatch-like hero shooter skirmish, but it surely additionally pulls from quite a lot of influences to combine up the gameplay. The rounds on this mode are nearer to the bomb-defusal aims of Counter Strike, with one crew planting bombs at specified places and the opposite defending, with comparatively small arenas that maintain rounds tight and centered.

As with all hero shooter, gamers can select from a choice of characters – named Lancers – who every have a choice of distinctive expertise, which means loads to study by way of particular person character preferences and crew 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 much like sticky mines and smoke grenades, in addition to sending Chomper out as help. Chomper can monitor and chew enemies for a number of low-damage assaults, basically like a strolling turret, or could 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 made from stone, Chum can be a robust defence character, making him an important all-round possibility for newcomers.

Many different Lancer talents aren’t solely offensive however defensive or tactical – partitions for canopy, traps, pace 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, together with her directly-controllable four-legged drone and gun turrets, we have been in a position to rack up a number of assists; whereas Axon was one other favorite because of his extra aggressive choice of expertise, together with projectile bombs and a cool guitar-gun. Within the Lancer choice display, you may watch a brief video clip for every means that will help you rapidly grasp what they do.

However what actually units FragPunk aside is its Shard Playing cards system. At the beginning of every spherical, every crew is randomly assigned a set of three playing cards, which they will swap out and in, every of which adjustments the foundations of the spherical in your whole crew. Some are easy stat proportion boosts or buffs, whereas others do issues like growing the scale of your enemies’ heads, lowering your individual or equipping helmets, affecting the problem of headshots for that spherical. Others nonetheless are far more uncommon, and fully change the gameplay.

For instance, one Shard Card gave our crew a sort of proximity detector in order that we received an aural and visible sign at any time when 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, resembling shrouding the map in fog that provides stress as enemies are more durable to identify. Others have energetic 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 may basically run unseen to a brand new location after which pop again into the struggle to ambush your foes.

Fragpunk – Dongtian Map

It’s so much to soak up. You solely have round 30 seconds to finalise your hand for every spherical, and at first every of the 150+ playing cards can be new to you. “We intentionally made the rule for every card so simple as attainable in order that they are often fast to grasp,” Artistic Director Xin Chang instructed us. “We additionally made the outline textual content for every card as quick as attainable, and used visible design to make its results extra apparent.”

After a couple of rounds, the Shard Playing cards system started to make sense, and actually paid off by way of making every spherical really feel completely different. We have been pressured to have interaction in another way with each spherical, rethinking methods and responding not solely to our crew’s present hand but additionally the enemy crew’s.

Apparently, the ruleset-shuffling Shard Playing cards have been impressed not solely by different videogames, but additionally by sports activities. The event crew’s constructing has a big gymnasium with amenities for actions resembling basketball, desk tennis and badminton, its partitions adorned with images of the builders in competitors.

FragPunk Screenshots

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 foundations to maintain the game fascinating. Primarily based on that concept, I additionally needed to have a system of tweaking the foundations in our recreation.”

Sports activities additionally influenced the crew’s strategy to FragPunk’s maps. Degree Designer An Yuan added, “In degree design, we divide the map into areas which might be good for assault or defence phases, in order that the participant has to maintain transferring. It’s sort of like basketball, the place you might have completely different spatial design across the court docket that fits the completely different roles of the gamers. We utilized that idea in our recreation, and likewise within the Shard Playing cards, which might flip a great hiding place into a foul one.”

FragPunk additionally incorporates a Duel mode. When a match ends in a tie, it adjustments to a one-on-one showdown, a bit of 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 quick 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 completely different tie-breaker mini-game. It’s so cool, the devs even added it as a separate standalone mode known as Duel Grasp.

Every map has interactive gimmicks that gamers can use strategically to achieve the higher hand. First, we tried the newly unveiled map Dongtian. That is the Hangzhou, China-based dev crew’s stab at an Asian-flavoured map, and its two bomb websites could be rotated by gamers for tactical benefit. When the change in the course of the map is activated by a participant, the core cowl on the bomb web site rotates, altering methods for each the offensive and defensive groups.

“We wish to use these rotating partitions to modify the sting between the assault crew and the defence crew,” defined Yuan. “So we encourage gamers to struggle 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 below their opponents’ toes; Akhet has an underground river that enables sneaky gamers to maneuver straight from the center space to a bomb web site; and Tundra has magic portals that immediately zap gamers between gates to outmanoeuvre the opposite crew. 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 special 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 sensible visible twist to FragPunks’ vibrant world.

Artwork Director Yiming Li instructed us, “We needed to mix historic buildings that seem like they may come from China with near-future science and expertise parts, in addition to some spiritual parts. Whereas every map may have its personal distinctive cultural options, we would like all of them to suit into the sport’s general sci-fi feeling. It’s like in Star Wars: Every of the civilisations are very completely different, however when they’re seen as an entire, in addition they exist below a harmonious sci-fi setting.”

And that brings us to FragPunk’s visuals. It is a actually attractive 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 have 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 can be free to play, with a small choice of Lancers out there in the beginning in order that gamers can study them steadily, unlocking extra as they undergo in-game foreign money accrued via play or paid microtransactions. Different non-compulsory purchases can be strictly beauty. We’ll have to attend till launch to see how the service aspect 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 great signal.

Along with the Shard Conflict and Duel modes we tried, FragPunk will function a mixture of modes at or after launch which might be 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 crew is outwardly largely made up of pro-level gamers, but it surely’s clear they’ve additionally taken steps to make the sport accessible to newbies and even streamers and their viewers.