Live service games, if they cut through the noise, can bring in more money than almost any other type of game. The problem, of course, is the noise. The developers have to find their niche among the countless multiplayer titles on the market that are constantly fighting for the players’ attention. If a game isn’t called Fortnite, Roblox, Destiny 2, or The Division 2, it might be called Diablo IV or League of Legends, and for every title that makes it, there are countless more that don’t. What these live service titles aren’t called is Splatoon, and here Square Enix seems to have found “its” niche.
Foamstars is basically a live service version of Nintendo’s multiplayer shooter for consoles (PlayStation 4/5), where the Splatoon series has of course never set foot. It’s perhaps as good a pitch as any, but the question is, are PlayStation gamers really so hungry for a “Splatoon-like” that they’ll accept any quality?
Contrary to the obvious (and wonderful) source of inspiration, Foamstars is not about colors, but about – listen here – foam. The opening text makes this clear, while also explaining that no one dies in Foamstars either. During the game you absolutely do not kill your opponents. You get “freezes”, not kills. Cool, right? The colorful, costumed and market-analyzed childish tone unfortunately struggles to capture the younger audience from the start, and the kind of self-distancing and irony that, for example, Epic is so good at in Fortnite, is noticeably absent here.
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Anyway, after me and my three teammates choose one of eight characters, the game begins. Smash the Star! We are dropped onto a giant ramp, surf down and land on one side of a total of three levels. Either a disco arena, some kind of casino or some kind of mixture of disco and casino arena. Using the characters’ various foam weapons – foam shotguns, foam rockets, foam rifles and so on – and their two different special abilities, we try to kill (sorry, “chill”) the opponents. When the opposing team’s players have been “chilled” a total of eight times, one of the players is randomly named Foamstar and becomes slightly more powerful. When this player is finally cooled down, the game is definitely over.
It is messy and unclear.
However, it is not a good idea to just aim the foam cannons at the opponent. If you’ve ever slipped in the bath, you know that soap and bath foam are treacherously frictionless, and again your own foam has the ability to speed up your team’s movements – but also vice versa with your opponents by slowing them down. It is therefore important to always try to cover ground, and in the heat of battle you must constantly press the L2 button to surf forward and navigate as best you can from foam patch to foam patch.
As for pace, this is absolutely necessary for survival, or maybe a little too necessary. Because the differences between the surfaces are so great that you either move completely slowly on neutral ground/enemy foam, or your character flails around as if it has been oiled before being kicked down a water slide. Neither surface is satisfying to move on, and one of Square Enix and Toylogic’s first balance solutions going forward should definitely be to shrink the differences between them. Additionally, the collision physics with the game’s vertical platforms are absolutely terrible. Whether or not I grab a ledge seems to be completely random, and generally there’s never any fluidity to my movements. It’s miles away from how Fortnite or especially Apex Legends feels.
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Unfortunately, there’s rarely any flow to the matches themselves either, and structurally it’s looked more or less identical in most of my hundred matches. It starts with a slow, minute-long start, followed by a minute-long middle part of surfing action, and then it breaks out into hellish chaos at the end where the whole screen flashes with foam, special abilities and various weapons that are almost impossible to control. What Blizzard has always excelled at in everything from Warcraft and Starcraft to Overwatch is the ability to design details that make characters and abilities recognizable even in the most crowded situations. In Foamstars, however, it often feels like I’ve got bath foam in my eyes after a few minutes into the game. It’s worse than the kill streak hell in Call of Duty’s worst multiplayer moments.
A foam party I’d rather not go to.
But every now and then there are a few games where things work. The team manages to communicate and coordinate without words, an ultimate shoots out a powerful beam of energy that puts the entire center of the court into foam, and we surf forward in a row towards the opposing team and fire shots in rhythmic formation. It surges back and forth, and these pulsing, aggressive advances overtime make me like the Foamstars more than it perhaps deserves. Because what PvP title isn’t fun when you win? The battle losses are far more interesting for context and reveal one of Foamstar’s biggest problems.
Due to what I assume is the target audience’s hard focus on casual gameplay, there is no ranked mode, only ranked events that come and go. Therefore, the resistance varies enormously, and in addition, it is basically impossible to get any kind of feedback on what I can improve after another chaotic hopeless loss. There are no general match statistics available, and after the matches only sparse information about your own performance is shown. Other players’ match stats remain hidden behind misguided GDPR protections, unless they happen to be the most valuable player.
However, the lack of feedback and a ranked mode are only parts of the larger issue at the heart of games as a service: sustainability and longevity. I simply can’t see how Foamstars can deliver any kind of variety and thus game value when the character choices have little impact on the games. Something other than more content is needed to create variety and sustainability here. And I just want to mention that the battle pass is very bad and the shop contains all sorts of “premium” cosmetic things that can be bought from the start, which is upsetting in a context where this is still, in all other respects, aimed at children.. .
Maybe Square Enix and Toylogic can fix this and polish out the worst bugs with updates, in typical live service style? Maybe, but I don’t think so. The problems are, as I see it, too deeply buried under the bath foam. And it’s a shame anyway, because despite Foamstars looking like an amateur project from Fortnite Creative Mode, I’ve still had a number of fun matches with good friends. Apart from some connection issues in the matchmaking, the experience has also been exceptionally stable and flawless, and the city’s pop jazz that highlights both matches and menus is always insanely catchy. If you have PlayStation Plus, this is “free” to download, so there is an opportunity to test it if the slightest urge arises. However, I would hardly recommend a purchase or subscription just for this.
2024-02-09 08:32:09
#Foamstars #Review
