Square Enix’s Splatoon-like Foamstars has style, maybe a lot of it

The bubbles are not as thick as the paint

• by
  
  Ana Diaz
  

• on Jun 19, 2023 1:03 PM

The new third-person shooter from Square Enix Foomstarswhich pits teams of four players against each other in bubble-packed battles, appears to be the company’s take on Nintendo’s popular ink game series, Splatoon.

As part of Summer Game Fest, Polygon got hands-on time with the game, and there’s good news: the match format offers a fun twist that leads to exciting competition. There’s bad news, too: fighting with bubbles doesn’t quite pack the same sparkly ink effect — and gameplay suffers because of that.

The general premise of Foomstars It’s easy to understand and navigate. To win the match, your team must kill any member of the opposing team seven times. Once your team gets seven kills, the best player on the other team becomes the “star player”, and you need to kill him to win the game.

Similar to the Splatoon games, you can spray the arena – venues include shiny Las Vegas-style clubs – with a lather of your team’s color and surf smoothly. Some skill attacks and bubbles can be fired at the same place to make a pile of bubbles which will then give you a better point to shoot (or shoot). Each character, a mix of cartoon idols and influencers, has two different skill attacks; For example, Soa with a pink braid can throw a grenade and do a swirling jump in the air emitting bubbles. Different characters have varying skills, so a character like Pen Gwyn is better suited for long distance sniping while Rave Breaker can cover the map with loads of foam.

Image: Square Enix

Image: Square Enix

The match format is a welcome development that will likely be more enjoyable for thrill-seeking solo players than carrying a tough match. The star player takes the brunt of the pressure in the late game and can turn the tide of the fight in dramatic fashion. At one point my team seemed to have an easy victory after fumbling seven skills in a row but ended up losing the game after a star player on the other team evaded us. When chasing them down, we lose focus on… staying alive.

For such a cute look, I struggled with it foamstarWhen it comes to the heat of battle. The bubbles bounced around a lot, leaving me oblivious to the actual effect my bubbles and weapons had. In general, it was easy to shoot at close range, but anything at greater distance was like shooting in the dark. Bubbles thicken on the screen as they pile up instead of just covering the map. More often than not, the bubbles seemed taller than my character and blocked them out.

Image: Square Enix

Image: Square Enix

The game features a mechanic where, if your character dies, they turn into a rolling ball of foam. At this point, either your opponent will need to surf to kill you, or your teammate will be able to revive you. It’s a fun mechanic in theory, but in the chaos of the match, it again causes visual confusion. The characters that look like balls of foam are difficult to recognize amidst the visual noise, though they are marked by neon signs that say “Opportunity.” The reviving mechanic added another element to an otherwise cluttered screen and slowed down the fast pace of battle. In the end, I ended up leaving several people in a foam ball state because I couldn’t find them.

Foomstars The frantic format should make it a welcome addition for any gamer who doesn’t have a Nintendo Switch. The fast and unpredictable nature of the matches led to exciting scenarios, and the game played without any major difficulty or bugs – which is impressive considering you have to juggle splashing and sloshing around in quick matches. However, as someone who regularly plays other famous shooters like Splatoon 3 And zero construction FortniteI can’t see myself switching to Foomstars anytime soon. The gameplay was a bit too difficult and visually disorienting to feel like a confident alternative to the more powerful shooters of the moment.

Foomstars Coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Square Enix has not announced a release date yet.

Read more