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.