Fragpunk Review

PC, video-games

After a lot of anticipation, the stylish hero-shooter Fragpunk has arrived from Bad Guitar Studio. While we are still waiting on the full release for consoles, the game is available to play for free now on PC.

Gameplay

This game showcases a lot of cool and fun abilities for each of the 13 available Lancers that you will get to choose from. 5 Lancers will be available for you to play for free while the rest will need to be unlocked by acquiring in game currency or buying them. Each character costs $5USD or you can subscribe to their monthly membership service which provides access to all of the Lancers along with a slew of other benefits.

When you choose a lancer, you will be given three abilities. Broker is equipped with a smoke screen, rocket launcher and grenades. Another character you will have access to for free is Nitro. She is equipped with a sentry turret, a deployable wall, and a combat drone for you to control.

There are 6 primary weapon categories with 12 weapons to choose from, 7 secondary weapons, and two different melee weapons. Fragpunk’s customization is very in depth and gives you a lot of room to have fun with how you customize your guns. You can add a kill counter to your gun, stickers, and charms. While that may sound fairly standard, you are able to apply these features wherever you would like them on the gun.

When it comes to character customization, you are able to edit headgear, gloves, outfit, and the banner card that will be displayed behind them when you finish a match. Some items are unlocked through leveling up, purchasing with real money, or other currencies used throughout the game.

Microtransactions

Lets address the elephant in the room, microtransactions. Fragpunk is a free to play game, so therefore you can expect to see some fairly high priced items in this game. They offer a monthly subscription a lot like Fortnite does, but paying annually comes with the perk of permanantly unlocking characters that are in the game and have yet to come to the game. It also unlocks premium battle passes, boosts to XP gain, in game loot, gun skins, and Fragpunk coins to spend in the store.

The game offers a free, premium, and ultimate edition of the battle pass with 60 teirs of items to unlock. The Premium battle pass is 900 Fragpunk coins/$10USD while the Ultimate edition costs 2500 Fragpunk coins/$25USD.

Lancer skins and gun skins have a wide range of prices. Some Lancers can cost 900 Fragpunk coins/$10USD while others cost 1400/$15USD. A single gun skin can cost 900 Fragpunk coins/$10USD. The melee weapon skins are by far the most egregiously overpriced microtransaction sitting at 3000 Fragpunk coins/$30USD for a single skin.

That is all the easy stuff that I can explain, I can’t even begin to explain the rest to you. Why? Well, there are 12 currencies total in this game and even after my time with the game, I still don’t understand all of them and what they are all for.

A Double Edged Sword

To help make sense of why there are so many currencies, there is an over abundance of events. This serves as a double edged sword because while on one side, you have a ton of content along with its challenges to complete, it is overwhelming to the player to see so much content with different kinds of currencies for each category.

This led to a lot of time spent on the main menu just trying to make sense of what it all meant. The user design is somewhat poor considering the amount of hoops you have to jump through on the menu to find the different set of challenges, rewards, and currencies. They are very unorganized and not in one place.

The great thing about all of that, is that there is such an abundance of challenges and rewards. You constantly feel like you are being benefitted for playing.

Game Modes

There are 15 game modes in Fragpunk. These game modes consist of team deathmatch, glunite grab/kill confirmed, free for all, and more. The arcade rotation has game modes like Rocketeers, Melee Deathmatch, Mirror Clash, Sniper Deathmatch, Capture the Core, Outbreak (survival/infection mode). The standard mode is shard clash which also has a ranked version once you reach level 30.

The arcade rotation has a lot of fun and unique modes, but I found myself landing in team deathmatch games a lot whenever I entered the rotation. The standard shard clash mode is where 2 teams of 7 will need to play offense/defense to plant/defuse a converter at point A or B. If there is a tie, there will be 1V1 duels between each player to determine the winner.

At the beginning of each round, teams will have to voted on which shard cards they want to use in the upcoming round. This can give you quite the edge over the enemy team. Cards can give you benefits like, better speed, no reloading, enemy team has big heads, and better healing.

Shard cards are the big thing that makes Fragpunk stick out in the oversaturated category of free to play shooters. They add to a very fun and creative experience that really adds to its replayablility.

However, shard cards can really mess with the balance of the game to a fault. Some cards are extremely overpowered. You can go as far as not taking headshot damage or blocking the enemy team from being able to heal. In one match, my team was getting slaughtered and we ended up winning thanks to shard cards. Whether you see that as a pro or con is up to you.

With that being said, the shard cards aren’t enough to make this game feel interesting. It is an absolutly great concept to combine with a hero shooter. The primary obsticle in the way of making this game fun is the amount of time it takes to kill someone.

When you say hero shooter, you think Overwatch or Marvel Rivals. Two games that require you to use your abilities, strategize, and a lot of shooting to take out you opponent. I even think of Halo and how you need to rely on your maneuvering skills to surviving an exchange of bullets. In Fragpunk, I would compare it to Call of Duty. Once you set your eyes on the enemy, you got ’em dead to rights in .02 seconds. Which completely undermines the entire card system and Lancer abilities.

When I was in a match, I mainly saw people using radars, turrets, and portable cover. When I reviewed Marvel Rivals, I made it a point to play as every character before writing a review. I didn’t feel the need to do that with this game because I never felt the need to use powers in general.

Snipers kill you in a single shot and shoot as quickly as a DMR. This literally ruins everything the developer is aiming to do. Sure there can be balancing updates. But at the end of the day, it still plays like a Call of Duty.

To top this problem off, it makes game modes like team deathmatch almost unbearable. There is next to no spawn protection and you spawn in the same room. Spawn camping is practically glorified in this game. If the enemy gets a good position on the exits out of spawn, its game over.

Summary

For Valorant players, this is a great game to get in to. Great map design, art direction, a ton of content, fun game modes, and the shard card system for sure makes it stick out amongst the rest. If you are looking for a fun hero shooter to give you a break from Marvel Rivals, you won’t find a good time here. Fragpunk‘s fast paced run and gun style of combat holds it back from you being able to fully enjoy all the things that make this game unique.

Fragpunk is for free on PC and is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S at a later date. We want to thank Bad Guitar Studio for supplying us with a code. Fragpunk was reviewed on PC. My PC stats are listed below.