Square Enix’s sudsy shooter Foamstars could be onto something

destructoid.com:

Foamstars feels a bit out of left field for Square Enix. A multiplayer shooter may not be all that strange; after all, the publisher did make a battle royale based on Final Fantasy VII. But this isn’t a straightforward shooter. Foamstars features stylish fighters rather than grizzled warriors and suds instead of bullets.

We had a chance to play Foamstars at Summer Game Fest 2023, getting in a decent number of matches. The easiest comparison point for the game is Splatoon, and not just due to the vicious, viscous warfare waged on each of their battlefields. Both games look at territory as an important factor in winning the day and see the firepower you employ as both utility and knockout power. That said, some similarities are a little obvious.

Characters have primary weapons that can dispense foam in different methods. The foam builds up and spreads out across the empty arena, creating avenues of ingress for teams to move around in by holding the left trigger to “surf” on the bubbles. Surfing is how you KO enemies that have their health depleted and pick allies back up after they’ve been knocked down. And much like Nintendo’s squid splatfest, you can move quickly across your own foam but get bogged down and sluggish in the enemy bubbles.

The knockout system is already an interesting twist on this style of shooter. By adding this Kill Confirmed-style method of taking out an enemy, it encourages risk. Foamstars wants you to push a bit farther, err away from caution, and get yourself into scramble situations.

Where the foam differs from the ink is how it piles up. The bubbles don’t paint surfaces. They stick to them and build up. You can build walls and new avenues of attack, lending a Z-axis to the movement and action.

Cha