FragPunk is a one-of-a-kind shooter for modern video games: it has released almost perfectly polished, balanced, and with excellent performance across a variety of PCs. Everything from the characters to gunplay feels like so much care and attention has been poured into the details. While you do have to wade through a bunch of menus and microtransactions, once you’re hooked in by FragPunk you’ll soon realise how smooth everything is.
My favorite part of FragPunk is its rolling category of casual game modes outside its intense 5v5 bomb mode. Apex Legends took a couple of years before they had a casual mode outside of battle royale, and while Valorant now has multiple ways to play the game now, it launched without them in a much leaner state.
Bonus Modes
In FragPunk, these modes (like Team Deathmatch and Glunite Grab) are the perfect way to warm-up for a match, and they’re not just tacked on at the end. There’s an entirely different set up Shard Cards you can use, as well as unlimited ammo and the ability to slide. The whole thing feels like an excellent, casual aim-trainer built right into the game – except the targets are real people.
Once you dive into a proper match you realise how smooth the gameplay is. To begin with, I was skeptical about the cards – particularly how long they take to choose between rounds – but after around 60 hours with the game I absolutely adore the system. There are brilliant cards, cards that are broken (in a ‘we have to ban this card’ way), cards that are fun, and none of them are particularly useless. The addition of card bans in Diamond+ ranked lobbies injects another layer of strategy into the game.
The time-to-kill also feels very well-tuned. While snipers can be frustrating to die to, players should be rewarded with a satisfying kill if they land their shots. Player skill is still important in FragPunk, but because of the cards and Lancer (character) abilities, there are multiple ways to win games that don’t rely entirely on how good your aim is. It’s a game that will appeal to both casual and sweaty players for this exact reason. Good aim will always help you win, but a casual player can still feel useful even if they’re not hitting their shots.
Balance And Polish
I love the weapons in FragPunk. They’re all unique, even if they share some characteristics: there’s your basic assault rifles, submachine guns, and so on – the Fever assault rifle is incredibly satisfying to use – and all of them feel balanced. At no point have I felt angered by something broken or overpowered.
It’s astonishing, because that’s definitely not usually the case in a shooter – especially not a brand-new one. I’m sure as the game progresses and everyone gets better at it we’ll start to see some broken strategies, but for now it’s bliss.
Each of the Lancers is distinct. While I think Spider’s teleport or Hollowpoint’s rifle are still annoying to play against sometimes, generally the abilities are balanced. You’d expect as much after multiple playtests for FragPunk over the past year, where the developers seemed to make positive changes and listened to player feedback as they went, but then other shooters do similar tests and don’t launch with this level of stability. I still think my guy Jaguar could do a little more tuning, but I expect plenty more of that to come in FragPunk. I don’t get the impression the developers are stopping any time soon.
The game launched with a membership subscription, and while I hated it at first, now I don’t actually mind. It’s £9.99 a month and for that you get daily rewards, some skins, access to the battle pass, and some other little bonuses. Having actually played a lot of the game now, it’s very rewarding for free-to-play players, with lots of progression, unlocks, and challenges. While the microtransactions are prevalent and the menus dense, you can ignore pretty much all of it and just jump right into a game.
Don’t spend too long looking at all that stuff. Take a little bit of time to learn a Lancer, pick your favorite gun, and have fun. FragPunk feels like a bit of a flash in the pan, and while I want it to succeed, it’s always best to enjoy these games while they’re fresh. We have no idea how long they might last, but FragPunk’s healthy launch will do it a lot of favours.
