Review: FragPunk, the free FPS where you create your own rules

The matches work similarly to their competitors, they’re separated into rounds and in each round the attacking team needs to invade a region to plant the bomb, while the defenders' role is to prevent this from happening. If the bomb is planted, the defenders have a set amount of time to disarm it; if they fail, it explodes, and it’ll be the attackers’ victory.

FragPunk has a more casual approach, unlike CS2 and Valorant where the winner needs to triumph in 13 rounds, in this game it’s a best of 7, these are faster confrontations where you only need to win 4 rounds.

The main new gimmicks begin when you realize that there are cards that change some of the game's behaviors. Before each round, you and your team will have three cards with their respective effects available, and you can spend Shards, a type of resource, to activate them on the next turn.

They bring varied possible changes to the game. It’s impossible to mention them all here, FragPunk arrived with 169 different ones, some being specific to defenders or attackers and others can appear for both teams. Some of the main abilities allow you to add or remove a point where the bomb can be planted, or make one of them foggy. Some also directly interfere with the shooting, granting protection against the extra damage from headshots, making you invulnerable to damage from the back, healing you or making your bullets explosive and more dangerous.

Each card has a specific number of Shards it requires to be activated, and you earn Shards as the rounds go by.

Another interesting point is that you have access to the cards that were made available to the enemies. This allows your team to set up counter strategies.

For example, my allies noticed that the opponents had the “Big Heads” effect available, which makes our team’s heads bigger to make it easier for them to headshot us. So, our idea was to select “Close Quarters Combat” which allows only melee combat, without shooting or skills. This was great for reducing the damage that the big heads would’ve caused us.

This can happen in several different cases, there’s a card which cancels all the opponents’ healing in the next round, using it when enemies have good effects to recover life in their hand would be excellent.

In rounds where you find yourself with a low number of Shards and the enemies got good effects, activating “Pull the Plug” can be a lifesaver, it cancels all the bonuses on that occasion.

Other differences compared to other FPSs

The cards are, without a doubt, the main peculiarity of FragPunk. But it’s still possible to observe other differences when comparing it to the most popular FPSs on the market.

Valorant and CS2 have shooting mechanics who are closer to reality. With a Vandal (Valorant) or an AK-47 (CS2), you can eliminate an opponent with a single headshot, even if they’re carrying a shield. In FragPunk, combat is more akin to Call of Duty, where you need to land two or three headshots to kill an enemy. So, you’ll hardly die without having time to react.

While on the subject of gunfire, it’s important to mention that gunshots are fluid and coherent in the game. In a market where recoil, trajectory and other minor details of a quality shot are increasingly in demand by players, FragPunk manages to please.

FragPunk features Lancers, characters with unique abilities similar to the Agents in Riot Games' shooter. However, here you can switch out your Lancer for another before each round, making the FPS even more strategic. It’s normal for some players to choose one character in the defense rounds and then change them when they attack or depending on the distribution of the cards.

Zephyr is a character whose main mechanic is to become invisible. If enemies activate “Eagle Eyes”, a card that exposes the location of nearby enemies, her abilities will become almost useless. In a case like this, some players switch to another Lancer.

The Lancers are also extremely fun, each one shows off their personality and playstyle very well. Some want to go all out with strong combat mechanics, while others prefer to act in a more stealth way, by setting traps.

Finally, another good innovation that we’ve only seen in FragPunk is the overtime or tiebreaker system. The matches are best-of-7, where whoever wins four rounds wins the match, but if the game goes to a three-on-three, the final round becomes a duel!

Here, the team distributes themselves and decides the order of the players and then, on a smaller map, the first player of one team starts a 1v1 against the first one of the other. If a certain number of seconds passes and no one’s won yet, both will start to receive damage per second, similar to a battle royale.

When one player eliminates the other, they continue on with their remaining life to face the second player in the next confrontation. And it’ll be like this until one of the teams loses all five of its players.

It was something that surprised me and got praise from the community. A different and fun system to decide the winner of the match.

Many titles in this niche fail to offer a good range of game modes to keep the gameplay fresh, but FragPunk doesn’t make this mistake. We have access to Standard and Ranked modes, which work almost the same way, but it’s also possible to enjoy the arcade and battle modes, both of which are renewed as the days go by, bringing diverse experiences to the players.

Another possibility is to play the Outbreak mode, where you’ll either be a survivor or a parasite. The zombies' objective is to kill all the humans, turning them into other parasites to strengthen their team. If time runs out and there are still survivors alive, they win.

These types of matches are excellent for providing the community with different experiences within the same game.

This is a very delicate topic, where we can see positive and negative points. It’s important to mention that FragPunk is not pay-to-win, and the microtransactions are mainly for cosmetics. It’s possible to buy characters with paid resources, but they’re also unlockable with the regular currency, similar to Valorant.

Some weapon and Lancer skins can be unlocked for free, either by completing missions or taking part in events. But most of them obviously require you to spend money on the game.

The Battle Pass and the subscription, similar to the Fortnite Club, are sold at affordable prices, currently costing around 10 dollars. The Battle Pass, just like in Epic Games' Battle Royale, pays for itself! In other words, when you buy it for 900 FragPunk Coins, in addition to all the other rewards, if you complete the track you’ll get this amount of coins back again to purchase the pass in another season.

There are also skin bundles sold for a greater amount of resources, which is nothing new to those who’ve played Valorant. In the example below, we see a set sold for 4527 FragPunk Coins, making you buy the 6400 coin bundle that costs 60 dollars. It’s an expensive price, but it’s clearly signposted to the public.

The biggest issue is in the game's “Lottery” tab, where we find a gacha system which has been gaining more and more space in the market, but always accompanied by criticism and controversy. Basically, you can buy capsules, or receive them in missions, and use them to “play the lottery”.

All the statistics are clearly specified in the details, and you can also see that there’ll be a guaranteed Ultimate reward after a good many attempts. But this will never guarantee the item you want, causing some people to spend more than they can afford on a chance to have something.

The cinematics and character models are incredible, movie quality! In-game visuals are average, but I played at the lowest quality. The interface in the middle of the game shows the information we need clearly, without visual pollution.

However, when we go to the menu itself, we’re hit with an overload of information. Even though the initial Lobby of the game doesn't look like it, it's easy to get lost within the flood of events and challenges available. It may be a temporary issue due to the recent launch, but I hope it improves with the updates.

As for performance, even though NetEase has been criticized for poor optimization in Marvel Rivals, a fact we mentioned in our review of this Hero Shooter, I believe they’ve improved this aspect for FragPunk. I didn't experience any crashes when playing in low quality with a relatively good configuration - we specified the hardware used at the beginning of the article. However, at the end of some matches I received the following warning about my video memory:

Despite this, I didn't really run into any problems, I played at a constant 60 FPS and all the confrontations were fluid regardless of the number of skills or shots being fired at the time, including when broadcasting live. However, the messages continued to appear after finishing most of the matches, so I removed even more visual resources until they disappeared.

I also didn't experience any bugs during my experience.

Pros

Cons

SCORE: 9

FragPunk definitely offers solid and fun gameplay, the FPS has a more casual feel and is perfect for getting together with friends, creating your own strategy makes each round unique, and even if you get bored, there are still other game modes available. The skins are well-made and many are offered for free or in the Battle Pass, which is affordable. The gacha system is not enough to make the monetization of this game a total negative point.

I hope you've enjoyed this review. I’m available if you have any questions or suggestions.