Last week’s Xbox Games Showcase included a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reveal for a team-based hero shooter called FragPunk that combines competitive Valorant-style gameplay with card mechanics. Based on the lukewarm reaction I saw in the livestream chat and later on social media, ‘Valorant + trading cards’ is not a pitch that’s lighting the gaming world on fire. I’ve become something of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a missiona🦄ry for gamesꦍ with card mechanics, so I’m here to tell you that I played FragPunk. It’s not what you think, and it is a blꦕast.
The trailer puts a lot of emphasis on the cards and all the wacky things you can do with them, and while those modifiers are core to the gameplay, letting people think this is in any way a card game does a disservice to FragPunk. The entire premise 💦of FragPunk is that it’s a team shooter with infinite possibilities, where every round will be entirely different from the one before. The cards are central to how you make that happen, but they’re not really cards at all.
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Interacting with them is fairly straightforward. Your team will be presented with three cards at the start of every round, each one representing a wild and wacky modifier that applies only to the upcoming round. Each card has a cost, and each player has a pool of resources they can spend to activate the cards. Some cards need their full cost paid to activate, while others have effects that increase in power the more you invest. You can choose to spend your resources however you want, or save them for later turns. It’s both a strategy mechaniꦆc and a way to add variety to every match.
A lot of comments compare Fr🦋agPunk to Friends Vs Friends, a PvP shooter with deckbuilding that came out last year. FragPunk is not a deckbuilder.
The card effects range from simple, like bonus damage for shotguns or headshots, to extreme, like Death Embrace, which spawns a reaper to kill an enemy and anyone near them when their health drops to 50 percent. I played seven rounds and saw some hilarious cards, like one that gives everyone on the team a turtle backpack that protects them from taking damage from behind, and one that fills the entire map with tall grass you can hide in to ambush enemies. You’ll get a hint at the start of each match about the opposing team's most powerful card, but you don’t know exactly what modifiers the opponents added to the round until you discover them during the round.
It’s also a hero shooter. Each round, you’ll choose from a roster of a dozen characters to play who each have three unique abilities. I played as a different character every round so I didn’t get a great sense of what each of their specialties was, but I liked Nitro, the engineer character that can drop a remote-controller tank drone and drive it around to s🧸cout the area.
The other interesting twist on the traditional ‘plant bomb, defuse bomb’ model is the loadout selector. Most weapons have a limited number of uses, so you’re forced to change your loadout after each match. You might wait 𒅌to equip your favorite assault rifle until you begin a round with a card that enhances assault rifles. If you choose your preferred weapon in the early round, you might find the later rounds, when wins matt🔴er the most, more difficult.
Counter-Strike was my favorite෴ shooter growing up, but these days I find it too competitive and demanding for my slowing neurons. Valoran♏t is much the same, and as much as I’d like to get into it, I just don’t feel like I can keep up. FragPunk feels like an approachable, fun-loving version of a genre that’s traditionally catered exclusively to the most hardcore competitive players, and that’s exciting for a scrub like me. Don’t let the cards or hero shooter fatigue turn you off. It might not be the easiest sell in the current market, but FragPunk is a blast.
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