Fragpunk is like every shooter, everywhere, all at once – and could be Netease’s next Marvel Rivals (if the dev plays its cards right)

Fragpunk is like every shooter, everywhere, all at once.

When a mysterious element called Glunite appeared, it shattered the Shardverse and gave Lancers their otherworldly abilities, pulling people from different realities into a kaleidoscopic series of parallel universes where they now work as mercenaries collecting Glunite for their own ends.

But Fragpunk feels like a confluence of simultaneous realities on more than an aesthetic level. The main game mode is a Call of Duty-esque Search and Destroy bomb defusal, ties are settled with a series of Warzone Gulag-style 1v1s, there are boing-boing movement pads like a battle royale, the gun economy and handling call to mind CS:GO, while the mixture of that with heroes is similar to Valorant, then the presentation of those heroes – with lavishly produced comics and animated backstory videos – is reminiscent of Blizzard’s Overwatch.

However, the unique aspect of Fragpunk that both ramps up the chaos and holds it all together is the Shard Cards.

Dealt between every round, Shard Cards place one-off modifiers on the next match. As you get kills and perform objective actions throughout a full game, you build up points which let you invest into different Shard Cards, or save up to pile everything into a particularly perfect power-play.

These effects can range from relatively simple – but extremely strong in quite a twitch-intensive, low time-to-kill shooter – things like buffing your max HP or turning on big head mode for the enemy team, to transformative rule changes which turn the whole map into an icy slip-and-slide or delete one of the bomb sites entirely.

The cards add a third metagame to your pre-match preparations, as you have to simultaneously consider not just your weapon and hero choice, but how the cards you and your team have picked interact with all of your other decisions.

“The cards can bring you so many strategies and bring so much depth,” Xin Chang, Fragpunk creative director, says. “We want the game to be more creative and add so many crazy ideas because the cards implement different, strange ideas.

“If you make a traditional competitive shooter game, you don’t have the chance to bring so many turning points because maybe players care more about the balance or they don’t accept so many changes to each round. But our feature is the change, so that’s okay.”

Many of the character abilities in Fragpunk feel very strong, from weapon skills like Broker’s built-in rocket launcher and Hollowpoint’s one-shot one-kill sniper, to far-reaching teleports on Corona and Serket, Sonar’s muffling and Kismet’s enemy detection.

The combination of powerful, often explosive, hero abilities and this constant ruleset shake-up gives Fragpunk a tangibly unique edge that could make every round feel exciting if Bad Guitar Studio can avoid a situation where some cards are so obviously better than others that they become an auto-pick.

With all of these huge effects going off at once, Fragpunk can also feel chaotic and there’s definitely a learning curve where it seems like you’re getting blown away in one hit quite often, however, the intended direction for the game as players progress is away from ability spam and more towards strategic team-play and advanced movement.

“Our chaos comes from the cards. That’s why we’re very careful about making new cards,” Xin explains. “At least at first, we don’t want new cards to be very overpowered – even though we play with a ban pick, we still try to make each card not OP, it’s very important.

“Chaos makes a game very fun to play and very casual. But if players play the game for a very long time as competitive players and develop their game skill they gain more control over winning and losing. It shouldn’t be very chaotic. If it’s too much chaos and you don’t have a way to win it’s basically luck. That’s what we don’t want.

“That’s why we’ve made some strategies to make the game more competitive.”

One of the ways Fragpunk brings these competitive strategies into the game is with the pace of play. Movement is designed to be fast and smooth, but not super-fast like Apex Legends.

Bad Guitar has tried to find a sweet spot where things like bunny jumping and other advanced movement techniques are possible and encourage players to incorporate movement into their play rather than just standing still and shooting, but aren’t the main determining factor in whether you win a gunfight.

The end result is supposed to reward a player’s skill with a marginal advantage that makes a solid difference in tight situations, but it’s apparently been a tough compromise to strike, as overturning movement can also lead to oppressive gameplans too.

“Some characters are very strong and we need to do some work on that balance. In our tests we found that players who can rush are very strong,” Xin says. “To take an example, we don’t feel like it’s very healthy to have lots of characters who can rush into the point because it’s not very technical. It’s very hard to defend them and makes the core gameplay more boring because you can just rush every time and take the spot.

“For this example, we will nerf these kinds of characters. But if a character is strong in controlling the map or slowing the pace, we think it’s okay. We think that’s healthier. It’s good to keep that in the game and we don’t want to make that kind of change, even if it’s strong.“

So it seems like the aim, almost counter-intuitively, behind strong character abilities is to act as a deterrent which slows the game down. Then, rather than relying on consistently overpowered hero abilities or ultra-fast movement to give matches a natural sense of speed, Fragpunk instead creates a flow by introducing a natural imbalance that’s central to a roaring debate within competitive FPS games: team sizes.

“6v6 came along with Overwatch and we tried it in our maps, but it didn’t work,” Xin concedes. “If you’re 6v6 you can equally divide 3 people at A and 3 people at B, so it looks very balanced. But we found that it’s essential in a bomb defusal mode that your defending force at A, B and mid is not balanced.

“When it’s not balanced players can come up with different strategies, but when there’s an equal number of players there’s an optimal distribution, there’s one best solution for defending. That’s too solid.”

“That’s why for the game mode that’s more similar to Counter Strike it’s 5v5, it can’t be 6v6. But for the mode more similar to Overwatch, I think it’s okay because they’re totally different games – not like an FPS but more like a MOBA. You need to have a tank, a healer, a DPS, and that works. But for a bomb defusal mode it’s a proven solution and why we’re still 5v5.”

But within that 5v5 framework, there still look to be a huge amount of options for players immediately at launch, with more than a dozen characters, a full suite of weapons and over 100 Shard Cards. So while Fragpunk is free-to-play and will receive updates after launch, it’s not in Early Access.

It also seems to be taking a more player-centred approach to the F2P model that’s thankfully becoming more common, with battle passes that don’t expire once you’ve bought them, skill-based match-making in ranked, but not in casual modes, and customisable cross-play with both console and PC, or neither if you prefer.

Bad Guitar is a NetEase Games studio and it will be interesting to see if Fragpunk follows a similar trajectory to NetEase’s other recent competitive shooter, Marvel Rivals, which was wildly successful, but ultimately laid off its entire US-based development team soon after launch.

Fragpunk obviously doesn’t have the immediate grabber of the Marvel license, but what it does have is a genuinely unique central mechanic in Shard Cards, exciting and intense shooting, huge abilities, exciting character design and what looks like a broad enough content offering to maintain a playerbase once the launch hype has died down.

“I feel it’s an essential trend for online service games to have enough content when they launch,” Xin states. “If you have the ability to provide enough content, you should. I think for Early Access, purely, it’s because the team is small and they don’t have enough efficiency for making enough content so they use Early Access to get some income to maintain development.

“I think if you have this kind of efficiency then you need to do as much as you can and be well prepared.”

Fragpunk launches on March 6 on PlayStation and Xbox consoles and on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Bad Guitar is investigating the possibility of a Nintendo Switch 2 port.