When a beloved genre starts to feel uninspired, it’s time to switch things up. Valorant, Rainbow Six: Siege, and Overwatch delivered years of fun, but they’ve grown predictable. Without innovation, adding yet another 5v5 shooter would be a recipe for mediocrity. Fortunately, FragPunk has an ace up its sleeve. Actually, what’s up its sleeve is Strange Herbs, a card that causes an area-wide overgrowth of tall grass, transforming the battlefield into a ganking nightmare. Strange Herbs is just one card coming to this hero shooter / deckbuilder, however. Judging by its appearance at Summer Game Fest, it could be just the innovation the genre needs.
FragPunk’s Hero Shooter Ace
FragPunk isn’t the first game to fuse deckbuilding with FPS action. Friends vs. Friends offered its own spin on the concept last year, but that’s only more reason to give
Bad Guitar Studio’s game look. “PvP FPS deckbuilder” is a fledging subgenre, with tons of room for expansion, experimentation, and improvement. Will you use Chain Reaction to give your bullets a chain lightning effect? Maybe deflecting bullets with Blade Master is more your style. If all else fails, use Death’s Embrace to insta-kill an opponent with less than 50% health remaining. The possibilities are vast, which is FragPunk‘s greatest strength and greatest potential weakness coming out of Summer Game Fest.
Balancing deckbuilders is brutal. You don’t need 1,000 hours in Slay the Spire or Magic: The Gathering Arena to know that. Getting costs, effects, and cooldowns right is hard even in single-player games. Trying to balance all of that along with 5v5 FPS gameplay won’t be easy. That said, the imposing challenge it offers the devs is exactly what could make FragPunk fun, if they pull it off. Using a card to activate Big Head Mode, aiming down sights, and turning an enemy’s cranium into a technicolor fireworks display sounds great. While Marvel Rivals doubles down on the Overwatch formula, FragPunk‘s going another way, and we’ll all benefit if this card-playing rebel can pull a trump card.
FragPunk will be released for PC and
