Gaming Nexus Plays: FOAMSTARS Article

gamingnexus.com:

Earlier this week some of the Gaming Nexus crew gathered round our PlayStation 5’s to check out Square Enix’s new live service third-person shooter Foamstars. If you’ve ever played Splatoon, you will recognize one of Foamstars’ biggest inspirations at first glance. I hopped in alongside Elliot, Eric, and Joseph from our very own team of stars, playing matches mostly in the main Smash the Star mode. Foamstars boasts a laid back vibe with bright colors, poppy music, and flamboyant characters. Here there are no kills, only “chills”, and they aren’t called matches, they’re “parties”.

The 4v4 shooter swaps ink for foam, which has a clever mechanic that allows you to pile up foam to both create barricades but also vantage points that you can climb (surf) to the top of. Matches, excuse me, parties, typically begin with both teams spewing loads of foam across the maps, which have a Las Vegas-themed aesthetic. Foam is how you maneuver around the map the fastest but is also your weapon’s ammunition.

There are eight characters available at launch, each with unique weapons and skills. Weapons are all riffs on traditional shooter armaments like assault rifles, shotguns, flamethrowers, and rocket launchers, only the rocket launchers in Foamstars shoot ice cream cones, which is kind of adorable. In Smash the Star, blasting the opposing partiers with enough foam will make them “foamed up”, which sees them rolling around in a ball of the sudsy stuff waiting either for a teammate to save them, or an enemy to chill them. Once each team has chilled enough opposing players, one player becomes the star. Eliminating that star player means victory for your team, or defeat, if your star goes down first. Parties devolve into chaos (as they sometimes do) and at times there is so much happening on screen you have no idea what is going on. With everyone shooting their foam all over the place, that is somewhat expected, but these old eyes did struggle at times differentiating what was what.

A