Summary
I was surprised athow much I enjoyeddiving into theFragpunkalpha test over the weekend. I’m a big fan of first-person shooters, growing up in the expletive-laden lobbies ofCall of Duty: Modern Warfare 2and, my personal favourite,Halo 3. I’ve got more hours inApex Legendsthan any other game (maybe than all other games combined at this point, but I couldn’t say for sure). But I’ve never quite got into tactical shooters.
I’ve done my time in the Erangel. I’ve dropped at Tilted Towers and Tomato Town (although, as those long-wiped place names will tell you, not for a while). I’ve bought battle passes, won heirlooms, and scored many a Victory Royale, complete with the chicken dinner prize. So why have tactical shooters proved a clip too far?
A part of it is the cadence of a battle royale that I love so much. If you’re playing with friends, dropping warm (or even cold) and slowly looting and rotating towards the zone is the perfect chance to chat and catch up – or throw ‘nades at each other. When you see an opponent on the horizon, you sit up in your gaming chair and start calling the shots. It’s a great balance of chilled out chatting and tactical gameplay.
There’s also a barrier to entry for most games. This is a skill barrier. Yes, I’m admitting I have skill issues. I’m nearly 30, I don’t have the fast finger reflexes of the 16 year olds headshotting me onValorant, or the blokes who’ve been practisingCounter-Strikeevery day since for the past 24 years. In fact, every time I’ve tried to get into one of those games, I’ve been so immediately overwhelmed that I haven’t lasted more than a couple of weeks.
Enter Fragpunk, stage left. The latest tactical shooter trying to break up the duopolistic grip that Valve and Riot have on the genre has NetEase backing and a TCG twist, but more importantly: it’s new.
Everybody’s learning how to play Fragpunk at the same time. Sure, some people are bringing their Valorant and Counter-Strike experience to proceedings, but they still need to learn the Lancers (characters) and weapons. Everybody is trying to work out which cards to purchase in Fragpunk’s version of the buy phase. We’re all at a similar point on the learning curve, and it feels far more welcoming as a result.
In one match I was hard carried by a very polite child with an incredibly high pitched voice and the letters ‘YT’ after their username, suggesting they’re an aspiring (or existing) content creator. Remind me to check out their channel. The kids are alright.
Fragpunk’s gameplay is solid, the shooting feels good and the characters are varied enough to keep things exciting from match to match. However, I’ve got one issue: the movement.
Full disclosure, I’m coming at this from an Apex Legends perspective. I’ve played so much of this game for one reason: its movement. While it pales in comparison to actual Titanfall movement, no multiplayer game with more than 12 daily players comes close to Apex in this regard. From Pathfinder’s grapples to Alter’s wall-breaching portals, the game is built around moving smoothly.
Nothing embodies this more thanthe slide mechanic. Another relic of Titanfall, there’s no better feeling than sliding down an enormous hill to third-party a fight at the bottom. Players have worked out how to bunny hop while healing, bounce off walls for a better strafe, and reposition in midair for complicated rotations and surprise attacks. But the best feeling movement mechanic is always sliding.
You can’t slide in Fragpunk. Like, at all. Press crouch while running? You’re now crouch walking. I get it, this is a tactical shooter, not a wallrunning, titan-dropping explosionfest. But it’s just too slow for my tastes. Adding ina little slideto quickly reposition would go a long way towards solving this issue. It would make racing around the map more invigorating, would let players have more fun in the early stages of a round, and it could lead to the community discovering and developing numerous movement techniques that the developers didn’t anticipate.
Perhaps this is why you’re able to’t slide in Fragpunk; the developers want it to be a controlled environment. This is not an experimental playground, it’s a serious, tactical shooting range. But it needs to be fun, too. And sliding is fun. Just saying.
As I played more Fragpunk, I unlocked new Lancers. Obviously, my first pick was the character whose passive ability lets them slide around the map. Axon puts the punk in Fragpunk, whipping out an electric guitar-cum-shotgun as one of their abilities. They’re a high-octane thrillseeker not dissimilar to Apex’s own, um Octane, and I had to see how their slides worked.
Reader, these slides are deeply unsatisfying. I attempted to slide around a corner to blast an opponent in the face with my trusty guitargun, only to find that I stuttered into a crawl. The only way I can describe Axon’s slide is like when a footballer tries to do a knee slide celebration on a dry pitch and, instead of coolly careering towards the corner flag like a drifting supercar, sticks to the turf and trips over their own knees. Their teammates usually attempt to cover up their faux pas with a friendly pile-on, and I needed my allies to come to my aid after my failed sliding coup in Fragpunk.
Instead of cruising past my opponent to blast the back of their head with a round of high-velocity pellets, I just kind of crouched in front of them, moving slightly instead of standing completely still. There was a second of inaction as both parties were confused at what had just happened, before they raised their rifle and executed me. I’d tried to be John Wick, and ended up more like John Lennon.
Maybe my wish for more sliding in Fragpunk is a monkey’s paw situation. Maybe I need to play more carefully, checking my angles and lining up headshots instead of running towards the foe with all guns blazing. But that’s not me. I know I’ll find a way to enjoy Fragpunkmy way, whether it’s by choosing a specific Lancer (Corona’s dash is pretty cool) or settling into the tactical playstyle. But I can’t help but feel, with a better slide mechanic available to every character, Fragpunk would have another weapon in its arsenal for the inevitable war against Counter-Strike and Valorant.
