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I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to pick up what Splatoon first put down eight years ago in a way that didn't feel totally shameless. And while there is still some distinct borrowing in Square Enix's Foamstars, the upcoming 4v4 online shooter is also clearly trying to do its own thing. As with any video game even remotely close to being a live service title, however, it remains to be seen if the soap bubble-based adventure has the ability to stick around.
Relatively little is publicly known about Foamstars still. Revealed during the recent PlayStation Showcase, it's set to release for the PS5 and PS4 at some point in the future, though no definitive date or window has been announced. There will apparently be several modes, however, and I actually had the opportunity to check out one called 'Smash the Star' during a hands-on preview at Summer Game Fest 2023.
It's worth noting that this hands-on preview was of a small slice of a game that's still some ways off, but what I played of Foamstars was, perhaps surprisingly, a good time.
Soap's on
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The basic premise of what I played had teams of four selecting characters from a small list with distinct skills and weapons, making them play significantly differently to each other. Each character has three skills and a specific kind of weapon, and each weapon is unique to the character. There's apparently no way of juggling these around, so if you want the long firehose of foam then you'll need to pick, for example, The Baristador; while another, like Soa, might be better at quick bursts of foam that don't deal as much damage individually but can add up quickly.
Team balance seems really important, which is probably not surprising to anyone that's played similar shooters. If you're not careful, you can easily build a team that gets hosed from a long distance, or is too squishy to last. Helpfully, there is a system for "downed" teammates where they are foamed into a ball. If an enemy surfs into them first, they're popped and need to respawn, but if an ally makes it to them they come back into the fight immediately.
Speaking of surfing around, foam doesn't just deal damage to enemies, it also coats the ground and builds up over time. In some ways, it's kind of a mix of how paint works in Splatoon with how building works in Fortnite. The idea seems to be to splash as big an area as possible with foam, and then focus on areas already hit with your team's colors to build up barriers and generally alter the battlefield.
This is where things get wet, wild, and hectic. More than once I found myself wondering what, exactly, was happening in the arena. It takes having the vision and foresight to keep the map's current foam state, your positioning, and the positioning of everyone else in the front of your mind all at once while dodging shots, keeping track of your own skill counters, and generally just not getting owned. All eight players are constantly doing the same in an arena that never quite feels too big nor too small, but just large and empty enough to require the constant use of foam to speed around and build.
Sticky wicket
"That isn't to say Foamstars is destined for the digital graveyard before it's even launched, but that it perhaps does not actually matter how fun it is to play in a sealed environment."
In the Smash the Star mode, defeating enough enemies eventually unlocks the enemy team's Star" player. At that point it's about downing said Star as fast as possible. But if not handled quickly, the opposing team can still cause another Star player to appear, which means it's now a race to see which team can defeat the opposite's Star and win it all. (We smoked our opponents five rounds out of five, though that's somewhat irrelevant to all of this. But, you know, just to note: my team ruled and I was MVP twice.)
Stomping the competition during my preview reminded me of other preview events I'd attended for online multiplayer video games that have come and gone and sometimes never really come at all. 2021's 'dodgebrawl' multiplayer title Knockout City was a blast, for example, and it shut down literally last week. Amazon Games Studios' hero shooter Crucible launched in May 2020 only to get pulled back into beta the following month and scrapped entirely in October 2020.
That isn't to say Foamstars is destined for the digital graveyard before it's even launched, but that it perhaps does not actually matter how fun it is to play in a sealed environment. What matters most is whether it's fun to play when the novelty wears off, whether content updates will hit the right cadence to keep folks coming back. What matters is whether online matchmaking is a total nightmare or smooth from the word go and whether or not monetization completely ruins the experience for many.
I don't have answers for any of that. What I can say is that shutting out the opposing team during my Foamstars hands-on session was maybe the most exciting moment of my entire Summer Game Fest 2023 experience. The rest remains to be seen.
Foamstars is set to release for the PS5 and PS4 at some point, though no definitive date has been announced. If you're curious about what else was shown during not-E3, you can check out all of our coverage of what would have been E3 2023.
