Live service games, if they cut out the noise, can bring in more money than almost any other type of game. The problem, of course, is the noise. Developers have to find their niche among the myriad of multiplayer games on the market that are constantly vying for 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 game that does, there are countless games that aren’t called that. The name these live service titles don’t call themselves is Splatoon, and that’s where Square Enix seems to have found “their” niche.
Foamstars is essentially a live-service version of the multiplayer shooter for Nintendo consoles (PlayStation 4/5), which the Splatoon series obviously never ventured into. It’s probably a good proposition, but the question is: are PlayStation gamers really so hungry for “Splatoon-like” that they will accept any quality?
Contrary to its obvious (and wonderful) source of inspiration, Foamstars isn’t about color, but, get this, foam. The opening voiceover makes this clear, explaining that no one dies in Foamstars either. During the game, you will never kill your opponent. What you get are “thrills”, not kills. Fantastic, right? Unfortunately, the childish tone of the colors, costumes and market analysis has struggled to appeal to younger audiences from the start, and the kind of distancing and irony that Epic does so well in Fortnite, for example, is conspicuously absent here.
Anyway, after my three teammates and I each selected one of the eight characters, the game began. Destroy the star! We were launched up a giant ramp, surfed down, and landed on one side of a total of three levels. Either a nightclub arena, a casino, or a hybrid between a nightclub arena and a casino. Using the characters’ various foam weapons – foam rifles, foam missiles, foam rifles, etc. – as well as their two different special abilities, we tried to kill (sorry, “cool”) our opponents. When opposing players “cool down” a total of eight times, one of the players is randomly marked as a bubble star and becomes slightly more powerful. When the player finally calms down, the game ends completely.
It’s messy and messy
Here is an announcement:
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However, simply pointing a foam gun at opponents is not a good idea. If you’ve ever slipped in a bathtub, you know that soap and bath foam are dangerously frictionless, and that your own foam has the ability to speed up your group’s movements and vice versa, slowing them down. So it’s important to always try to cover ground and, in the heat of the moment, keep pressing the L2 button to navigate forward and move as much as possible from one foam patch to another.
In terms of speed, this is absolutely critical for survival, or perhaps a little too necessary. Because the differences between the surfaces are so vast that you move absolutely slowly on neutral ground / foam of enemies, or your character shakes as if he was greased before being thrown down a water slide. Neither surface will be satisfactory for the future, and one of the first solutions to the balance of Square Enix and Toylogic will certainly be to bridge the differences between them. Additionally, the collision physics with the game’s vertical platforms are absolutely terrible. Whether or not I managed to grab the ledge seemed to depend entirely on luck, and overall there was never any real flow to my movements. It’s very different from the atmosphere of Fortnite or especially Apex Legends.
Unfortunately, there’s rarely any fluidity even in the game itself, which, structurally speaking, appeared more or less the same in my hundred encounters. It starts with a slow, minute-long start, then a minute-long middle section of surfing action, then explodes into absolute hellish chaos at the end, with the entire screen flashing with bubbles, special abilities, and all kinds of almosts. uncontrollable. weapons. What Blizzard has always excelled at in everything from Warcraft and Starcraft to Overwatch is their ability to design details that make characters and abilities identifiable even in the most crowded situations. However, in Foamstars, I often felt like I had bath foam in my eyes within minutes of starting the game. This is worse than the kill streak hell of Call of Duty’s worst multiplayer moment.
A foam party I’d rather not attend.
But sometimes a few games can be enough. The team managed to communicate and coordinate without words; the ult fired a beam of energy so powerful that the entire center of the level was in a bubble, and we lined up and charged forward at the opposing team, firing in rhythmic formation. It has its ups and downs, these heart-pounding, extraordinary positive developments that make me want to like Foamstars, perhaps more than it deserves. Because what PvP title isn’t fun when you win? The lost match is more interesting for context and exposes one of Foamstars’ major problems.
Since I think the target group is focused on very casual gameplay, there is no ranked mode, just ranked events that come and go. As a result, the backlash varied widely, and on top of that, it was virtually impossible to get feedback on how I could improve after another chaotic, hopeless loss. There are no general match statistics available and only little information about your performance is shown after the battle. Other players’ match stats remain hidden under misleading GDPR protections, unless they’re the MVP.
Here is an announcement:
However, the lack of feedback and ranked models is only part of a larger problem at the heart of games as a service: sustainability and longevity. I simply don’t see how Foamstars offers any kind of variety and therefore gameplay value when the character choices have almost no significant impact on the game. Besides more content, something else is needed to increase diversity and sustainability here. I just want to mention that the Battle Pass is terrible and that the store contains a variety of purchasable “premium” cosmetics right from the start, which is painful in the context that everything else is still aimed at children…
Maybe Square Enix and Toylogic can fix this and, in typical just-in-service style, eliminate the worst flaws with updates? Maybe, but I don’t think so. It seems to me that the problem is hidden too deep under the bubble bath. Regardless, it’s a shame, because even though Foamstars feels like a side project to Fortnite’s creative mode, I still had a lot of fun matches with good friends. Aside from some connectivity issues in matchmaking, the experience is also very stable and bug-free, with the urban pop jazz highlighting pairings and features that are always very catchy. If you have PlayStation Plus, you can download it “for free”, so you’ll have the chance to try it if you feel like it. However, I would hardly recommend purchasing or subscribing to this.
#Foamstars #review #Gamereactor
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