Fragpunk review

What if, while playing a competitive shooter, you could force your opponents to fire their weapon every five seconds, even when they're trying to camp in a corner? What if you could instantly teleport them back to their spawn when they take damage? What if you could toss aside a weapon to turn it into a mini-turret?

Every match Fragpunk tosses out half a dozen gimmicks that could anchor entire videogames with its incredible Shard Card system: The more than 150 cards in the game offer a variety of buffs, debuffs, and outlandish abilities with the game-breaking power of old-school cheat codes. It’s an adrenaline shot for a genre often obsessed with creating a balanced experience. Instead, Fragpunk is all about letting players break the rules to swing matches in their favor.

While Fragpunk takes the basic formula of Counter-Strike and Valorant, with each 5v5 Shard Clash match consisting of defenders protecting a bomb site and attackers trying to plant the bomb, matches are much shorter. Quick play is the first to four round wins, and ranked is the first to six. This gives each match an urgency that pairs well with the unpredictable cards and slightly faster pace: You don’t reach a point where you're seeing the same card combinations or rounds grow to be samey, like everyone saving money to slow-push into a bomb site with Vandal rifles in Valorant or snipe down the central path in Dust2 in CS:GO.

As you kill members of the enemy team, plant the bomb, defuse the bomb, land assists, and complete rounds, you earn points to spend on Shard Cards before each round. Those points can be invested in three cards randomly offered up by the game to unlock their abilities. To promote better teamplay, there's also an option to let one player manage your points (or the whole team’s points) to craft the best strategy with card combinations. This is a great feature, especially when players in my matches didn’t have voice chat. We could still coordinate a gameplan or allow a de facto team captain to lead the way.

Shard Cards vary widely. Some are minor stat changes; others are so overpowered or unlock abilities so absurd I couldn’t believe they existed. One made me shout louder in voice chat to boost my movement speed; another let me lie down and nap to heal. There is even a card that lets you teleport to a different dimension to surprise enemies when you reappear. You can explode a mini-nuke that kills everyone within a limited radius, even passing through walls.

The creativity on display here is leaps and bounds ahead of any other competitive FPS, and there are so many cards. There are even objective cards that fundamentally break the rules of the mode, like being able to plant the bomb anywhere on the map—or spawn five bombs for everyone on the team to go charging in with. It's exhilarating as a player to suss out an advantageous combination in the moment, and even more gratifying to be constantly surprised by what I can do in the game because of them.

Dealer's choice

It is just so refreshing to play something so radical and unconventional in a genre that is often stale. Despite the wild swings that both you and your opponents can cause, Fragpunk doesn’t ever feel unbalanced. While the enemy team may have a huge advantage because of the cards they choose in a round, generally the next round I'd see something just as potent for my team, or we could save our points and invest big in the next round to completely wipe them out in seconds with three active cards. It’s an effective tug-of-war, with each team taking turns having constantly rotating superpowers to help them out.

Fragpunk also breaks from some other conventions: Between rounds you can switch your Lancer (aka hero) and weapons. There is no money; there are just limits on the number of rounds you can finish with a LMG, assault rifle, pistol, etc. This is another clever differentiator from Counter-Strike and Valorant, forcing players to engage with the card system to inform their weapon choices. For example, some cards will boost the accuracy of a weapon type or unlock charged shots for a shotgun. Capitalizing on these perks, rather than falling back on a top-tier rifle, pushes you to make the most of every round and makes weapon choice matter more.

Each Lancer has a set of abilities that pull from familiar archetypes: the one that can spot enemies around corners, the one that can block sightlines, and so on. But none of them are carbon copies of the characters in Valorant or other hero shooters, and they often offer abilities from several of the archetypes to enhance flexibility in how you play them.

Spider has a trap that he can place on walls that blinds enemies, but Corona can activate a similar blinding effect that detonates after a few seconds, combining that with his dash, so that when he dashes around corners, he blinds an enemy instantly. This pushes Corona into a much faster playstyle than Spider, even though they can both blind opponents. While Spider fills a more traditional Sentinel role like you would see in Valorant, he also has a bomb that he can throw that sucks enemies in and teleports them directly in front of him, giving him an initiator-style ability that can yoink an enemy out of cover and let your team push in.

Even when abilities are functionally similar to what I've seen before, the way they combine with the others in a Lancer’s kit makes them feel like new and exciting iterations.

It gives the game’s Lancers less structure as they don’t fall into classes, but allows for more flexibility within matches. On the fly you can change to a rusher like Axon or Corona if you have a team that plays slow at the back of a map, or use a Shard Card that boosts movement speed and allows you to load all your ammo into one magazine, overwhelming a team by pushing quickly. You can do this for one round, and then completely alter your Lancers and weapons based on the shard cards you get during the next round. This ability to constantly remake our strategy every few minutes lead to some thrilling matches. There’s an extra level to how to outsmart your opponents here compared to the competitors—unlike in Counter-Strike, consistently executing the same playbook again and again won't cut it.

I’d consider the gunplay, sound design, and movement to be as good as any other shooter available today, with a distinctive blend of the precise aim needed in Valorant and CS and the faster movement found in Apex Legends. Guns have kick, but aren’t ridiculously difficult to control. You AR’s recoil isn’t going to suddenly become harder to manage the longer you fire. But you can’t just blast around a corner and spray an SMG because the spread will be atrocious. Everything is animated and presented like an animator’s sketchbook: I love the little animated flair effects when you land headshots, and the game’s maps, Lancer designs, and menus are coursing with color and dripping with personality. It all helps Fragpunk feel cohesively and confidently its own thing.

The more forgiving gunplay than many of its competitors accommodating the faster pace and variety that Shard Cards introduce. It allows you a chance to fight back if you're surprised by an ability or strategy, but you can still run and gun like Call of Duty. Fragpunk's fast, but movement speed has unfortunately been pulled back significantly since the beta, and I do feel that needs to be reversed at least partially. This was done to avoid jump shots around corners and other crazy movement tech that the beta's best players were running rampant with. Now the game leans a bit too much towards the movement speed of its competitors, diluting one element of its unhinged identity.

Gachapunk

Like Netease’s other recent shooter, Marvel Rivals, Fragpunk is all about the conveniences: a full replay system, casual modes if you want something less competitive, and one of the better weapon skins and customization systems I have ever seen. You can manually place stickers, weapon charms, and kill counters wherever you like on a weapon with an intuitive menu.

This is marred by an overly complex and gacha-esque microtransaction and unlock system that's a real drag. With random decoration and sticker packs that you unlock while playing (or by buying), you can use duplicate stickers and items to “level up” and upgrade them to a higher rarity sticker. So, 10 uncommon stickers gets you one rare sticker. An overwhelming assault of currencies, limited-time customization items, battle passes, other event-specific currencies, and gacha pulls are thrown in my face every time I boot up the game. I have to do a part-time job every time I want to complete a challenge, redeem rewards, or unlock something, making it through a mess of menus before I can get back to charging at enemies and blocking bullets with a super-powered katana.

While Fragpunk does a decent job of giving you opportunities to earn everything through play, like so many free-to-play games it's an unnecessarily confusing melting pot of systems and currencies. I’d rather just buy what I want than have to gamble for a melee weapon or a skin. I wouldn’t say the microtransactions are egregious—looking at you Call of Duty—but it all could have been streamlined significantly.

Despite the typical live service junk, Fragpunk is one of the most creative and refreshing competitive shooters in years. Its philosophy of moving away from restrictive systems and an eternally level playing field to let players experiment round-by-round with characters, Shard Cards, and strategies has created one of the strongest identities for a game in this space right now. It doesn’t take any shortcuts or drop its creativity, fresh ideas, or twists anywhere.

The more I've played Fragpunk, the more sure I've become that it'll be in my rotation for months if not years to come. It feels like a rallying cry for developers to create a new wave of shooters that don’t copy the competition’s work and instead break the rules. This is how you get Counter-Strike, and not just another Counter-Strike wannabe.