For a genre built entirely on the appeal of its characters, recent hero shooters have woefully lacked spice and creativity. Poor, forgettable designs have made recent failures and underwhelming hero shooters on the horizon (sorry Concord and Project Ethos) look like trend chasers showing up years late to the party. However, there is one upcoming hero shooter that's doing everything right: Fragpunk. It's giving the genre a shot of adrenaline it desperately needs right now.
Developed by NetEase’s Bad Guitar Studio, Fragpunk is a 5v5 Valorant-style hero shooter but with much shorter games, seven rounds maximum, and more forgiving gunplay (although you still need good aim). Fragpunk doesn't feel like it has a Chinese mega-publisher behind it. Instead it feels like an experience sketched out in a teenager’s notebook or conjured up in a dorm room by a bunch of college students, because its ideas and presentation are so unsafe from a business perspective.
I put 20 hours into the closed beta last month and found that its main twist and unparalleled presentation are genuine innovations for a genre that's been pretty stagnant since Overwatch came onto the scene almost a decade ago.
Shard cards are that gameplay twist: These are power-ups activated at the start of each round by acquiring points upon kills, deaths, round completions, etc. They are effectively cheat codes designed to break the strict ruleset you often find in competitive shooters. Lifesteal, when activated, heals you as you deal damage. Big Head gives all enemies big head mode for the round. Weapon Morph turns a dropped weapon into a mini turret that fires autonomously. There were more than 100 of these Shard cards in the beta, many of them completely altering how matches play out and introducing powerful, off the wall abilities that would be reserved for ultimates in any other hero shooter.
There are even dynamic Shard cards that power up depending on how many points you invest as a team, like you're boosting your squad's Discord server. The card Extra Converter, for example, allows you to spawn additional bombs on the attacking side. In one match we eventually got up to five bombs so everyone on the team could hold one. Imagine that in a game of Counter-Strike.
Combinations of cards can completely change how you approach rounds as they can massively swing the odds of a win. In one game my team used Freestyle Placement, which allows you to plant the bomb anywhere, to place the bomb in our own spawn. We then dropped several weapons with Weapon Morph to place turrets all around the lanes to defend our spawn and the bomb, effectively turning us into the defending team while still on offence. I can’t say any other competitive shooter has allowed me to do that before.
This is a huge design risk—shard cards effectively break the game and can give one team a massive advantage, but your ability to counter them with your own Shard cards actually balances each round surprisingly well. Even if you don’t have the perfect counter, you may gain an advantage over the opposing team in a different way. It also forces you to think outside the confines of what your hero can do and the basic lane-structure of a given map. Flexibility is paramount every single match. You can’t win with just one strategy. I constantly had to adjust to new obstacles, challenges, and gameplans from the enemy team, and that variety got its hooks into me during the closed beta.
The heroes, known as Lancers, have unique abilities without exception. They don’t fall into the pitfall Valorant is in where all walls function in a similar way or every smoke looks and plays similarly. Fragpunk doesn’t want to create a balanced experience—at least not at that level of minutia, and that’s what makes it exciting.
I was particularly drawn to the character Broker, who has a pretty standard rocket launcher, but also a set of mini traps that place bombs in a sphere rather than flat on the ground, allowing for some unique placements that cover both vertical and horizontal positions. My second favourite Lancer was Kismet, who can spot enemies through walls by creating mystic hand movements and throw them off with a teleport. I also regularly got destroyed by the rock-punk maniac Axon who has a guitar shotgun that he can pull out to deal devastating damage and play a tune at the same time. All of these heroes play and interact with the maps and Shard cards in different ways, deepening the gunplay and strategic breadth beyond what any other shooter in the genre is doing.
One problem games like Concord faced is that all the heroes felt like they had been dragged from different universes and smashed together. The abilities didn’t gel together well, and the gameplay wasn’t offering anything you couldn’t find elsewhere. Plus, none of their personalities were reflected in the gameplay or dialogue. None of that's a problem in Fragpunk.
Character kits are themed and abilities fit their playstyle. On top of that, these Lancers are bursting with personality, not only in their abilities but also in the designs, voice lines, and character intros in the menu. The game opts for what I can best describe as an acid-trip comic book style with a vivacious presentation full of movement and bright colours whether you are in a menu or the middle of a gunfight.
Shard cards snap with sparks spewing from them. Abilities have little paint strokes of colour coming off of them as you use them. Everything feels unified and tied together by this art style, a fine polish atop its excellent gameplay and map design.
Fragpunk feels alive in a way few other shooters in the modern era do, and in a way that feels strikingly out of lockstep with the sensibilities of AAA publishers who have been playing it safe for years. There’s a reason games like Fortnite and Apex Legends have had seasons that return to the gameplay and guns available at launch. It’s because they know it worked once, so surely it has to work again.
Instead of feeling sterile like hospital walls, Fragpunk's menus are filled with little stylish presentation strokes. Characters are crafted in a way where their designs and personality elegantly fit their functionality. Shard cards crank up the variety of matches with an indie roguelike-esque zeal. They aren't afraid to let rounds take wild swings and force players to adjust to it.
Because of this Fragpunk has the potential to outlive the many other hero shooters that have come and gone, and are yet to arrive. It's driven by a desire to break the rules of a genre obsessed with fairness and balancing down to decimal points. It may sound weird to say about a hero shooter, but Fragpunk is taking a risk in the way games like Portal, PUBG, Minecraft, and Demon’s Souls did. It's exactly the kind of attitude publishers should be taking, because it's actually far less risky than walking down the same path that has seen so many live service failures in the last few years alone.
Fragpunk is set to launch in 2025 on PC, and there is likely to be more betas early next year ahead of that launch. Don't miss it—this is going to be one of the best shooters of next year.
