FragPunk is a first-person hero shooter where you use deckbuilding card mechanics to augment your characters’ strengths and weaknesses. It’s the next free-to-play game from NetEase, which also produced Marvel Rivals, and it’s coming out this week, just not on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S where it was suddenly delayed just 24 hours before launch.
“We want to be fully transparent with you,” FragPunk’s developers wrote in a statement published last night. “During the console compliance testing process, we encountered unexpected technical challenges in optimization and adaption. Rather than rushing the console release and providing a potentially poor user experience, we have made the difficult decision to delay the launch of the console versions to ensure that players receive a comparable experience to those on PC.”
While there’s no new release date for the console versions (PC comes out March 6), players on those platforms will get some free rewards for the inconvenience. All would-be PS5 and Xbox players will get all in-game currencies, cosmetics, experience points, and more that they would have earned during season 1 if they’d played at launch. No grinding involved! Those who pre-ordered the game on those platforms, meanwhile, will get an extra $10 in in-game currency when the game goes live there. Hopefully the game’s not dead by that point.
If you’re sitting here asking yourself what the hell is FragPunk, well, it’s a very colorful, very pretty-looking multiplayer PvP FPS announced back at Microsoft’s summer showcase last year. Players collect cards that change how they play every round. “Cards can amplify your jump height, reverse the roles of attackers and defenders, engulf your bullets in flame or turn them into chain lightning, and even may resurrect you and your team,” reads the Steam page description.
It sounds neat, but also looks very much like “another one of those.” Weirdly, this potential also-ran is another NetEase game, which means that in addition to going up against an already crowded multiplayer field consisting of everything from Fortnite and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 to Valorant and The Finals, FragPunk is also going up against NetEase’s own Marvel Rivals, another free-to-play hero shooter that’s just three months old. Maybe FragPunk was the Chinese publisher’s backup plan if Marvel Rivals didn’t hit.
But it did, so hopefully FragPunk can still find some room to breathe at launch, at least so it can survive long enough for console players to give it a shot while its potential community is still thriving.
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