Fragpunk has potential to shine, if it weren’t so fixated on mimicking a high-reward slot machine.

In a lot of ways, Fragpunk is much better than I expected it to be. One round the other day began with a wave of frantic team chat screams – standard, for a competitive shooter in the CS:GO mould – only this time the usual storm of verbal friendly fire came with a twist: “BIG HEAD MODE! BIG HEAD MODE! GIVE THEM BIG HEADS!!!!”

Fragpunk’s central gimmick is brilliant: a playful, inventive twist on an otherwise staid and serious subgenre that is really dozens and dozens of playful inventive twists all in one. Layered over the entirely by-the-numbers competitive FPS foundations of bomb planting, sightline guarding, smokescreen abilities, and maps with little labels on each part of them like “B Long”, is a chaotic system of card-based power-ups.

Okay, card-based power-ups are frightfully old news at this stage. In fairness, I thought that too at first, and came here fully prepared to write Fragpunk off as another one of those nearly-shooters, where a series of anonymously punky characters, backstories about some magic whatever, and a few neat and tidy added mechanics that are smart-ish in theory all come together to form a perfectly adequate new FPS – one that leaves the public consciousness as fast as it arrives. Not so! Or at least not totally so. Card-based mechanical twists are old news, yes. So are team shooters with an overcompensating neon colour palette. But Fragpunk’s are legit.

The key here is in the chaos. The cards work like this: at the beginning of each round, where you’d normally be in the ‘buy phase’ of picking and gradually upgrading your guns or bickering over why nobody’s chosen the healer, three cards are offered to your team at random. They each have a cost, that cost increasing roughly in line with how impactful it is, and your team needs to pool chips (a currency earned during the match) to essentially vote for and buy them. These cards all enable temporary modifiers when purchased that round, but crucially not always outright buffs. Some of them enable the aforementioned big heads for enemies, making it much easier for you to land those all-important headshots. Others remove all guns from the round, so both teams can only use melee weapons, or teleport enemies back to their spawn point after taking damage, or grant you a projectile-blocking katana for charging them down.

For someone who’s always found this genre just a little too self-serious, especially for what is ultimately a game of peeping around corners and creeping down empty corridors like a kind of heightened, twitch-reaction hide-and-seek, this stuff is perfection. There’s no wasting time on thematic alignment – these modifiers borrow from fantasy, cyberpunk, whatever a bullet-blocking turtle backpack is – and no real explanation, beyond a highly skippable one-time cutscene on launching the game for the first time, which mentions something about these cards being infused with a reality-distorting substance called, oh I dunno, Gloopies? Gluhwein? Whatever. The point is all the less desirable stuff from this genre, the toxicity and the almost excessive levels of tension, are quite easily defused when the thing people are shrieking about is called “Mass Crab Walk”. In playing a highly moreish few hours of it this week, I’ve had a blast.

But the chaos is also Fragpunk’s undoing. This game is utterly cursed with a searing migraine of a metagame layer, one which takes its already frantic in-match energy and supercharges it to absurd levels of hyperactivity. There is the general UI, which like fellow NetEase-backed team battler Marvel Rivals is, at first glance (and many subsequent glances), an impenetrable web of menus, sub menus, notifications and icons. There’s the style, that specifically gamer-flavoured energy drink chic of neon, middle fingers, dayglo XD symbols and dubstep. A style I continue to believe has been ascribed to competitive gaming in particular – the esports wub – without anyone actually saying they liked or wanted it first. Someone with too much venture capital money to spend in 2016 just decided this is what gamers identify with and we’ve all had to live with it since.

Beyond that though, which is ultimately just superficial, is something more troublesome and more genuinely grotesque. It’s unlucky timing for Fragpunk, but just as I started playing it the other day, I read a quite brilliant blog from game developer and professor Joey Shutz on how game design can wilfully encourage video game addiction – or if addiction is too loaded then “engineered compulsion”, “engagement farming”, whatever you find most appropriate. This isn’t a new thought, of course. I remember writing about this in 2020, in the context of an exhibition on the “war against rest”, and there’s been plenty more said about it since long before that as well. The point is, as this blog notes, citing Natasha D. Schull’s book Addiction By Design: many video games are using the same techniques employed, to devastating effectiveness, by barely-regulated gambling machines of Las Vegas to encourage an unhealthy, obsessive compulsion not necessarily to spend more, but simply to play more.

This stuff is, I should emphasise, everywhere in games now. It’s in all the games you love and all the games I love – I’m an open hypocrite here, before you start lobbing my gushing Pokémon TCG Pocket bylines back at me. And here it’s in the form of all the usual things most people already loathe – loot boxes obviously, and other randomised rewards – but also in the most fundamental elements of design. A progress bar for your character hitting the next level, say, can be engineered to tickle the same part of the brain. Or just the very act of gambling with your time on the success or failure of a competitive round. Tell me you haven’t queued up for another game of FIFA, or Call of Duty, or League of Legends or anything else played against others online, and not felt an urge desperately similar to barking out, “hit me.” Or, as Shutz notes, the pull to see what happens when you opt for Civilization’s One More Turn. (For me, that’s hammering Continue on Football Manager – what problem or reward pops up in my inbox next?!)

Anyway, it’s everywhere in games, but in Fragpunk, my word, it is specifically everywhere in this game. Imagine all the possible ways a video game could trigger a compulsive urge in the human brain and imagine those, then, all bursting out of the screen at once. An orgy of Skinner Boxes and operant conditioning. Finishing a regular match, for instance, results in not one, not two, but up to eight subsequent screens of rewards, unlocks, or skidding progress bars towards battle passes or one of literally dozens of objectives. Exclamation marks abound, highlighting all those freshly acquired swathes of tat, or tat-accumulating busywork. There’s a little demon dog thing which hoovers up currency and more rewards, which you have to periodically go and click on to empty, like smashing a yapping, devilled piggy bank every couple of games. There are multiple pop-up screens each with multiple things being advertised to you – adverts for the game, within the game, another free-to-play staple – each time you log in. Hell, there’s even a literal fruit machine you can go and interact with by your spawn point at the beginning of each round, which may or may not spit out a rarer version of a gun.

Most striking of all, though, is that central conceit. The cards. These cards are genius, I think, one of the best twists on this format in a little while. But there are two big problems. The first is speed: Fragpunk knows that getting you into a round is a matter of utmost urgency if it’s to keep you plugged in, and so you get a matter of seconds to not just pick your character and pick your gun, but also to read the details of the three cards so thematically drawn for you, read the cards the other team’s been shown, communicate somehow with your team about how to prioritise and then actually vote on them. Most games, people don’t spend all their chips, which I suspect is at least partially because this whirlwind of carnival colours and sounds is just a bit too much. The game’s obsession with drawing and revealing things to you trumps the actual utility of how you play with them.

Second, with all this at the front of my mind, suddenly all I see when I look at them is, well, gambling. To put it another way: I play poker with friends now and then, very badly and never for any real money. Almost every time I get knocked out, commiserating myself with another slice of tepid pizza, I hear myself saying to the nearest person some version of, “Man, I didn’t even want to win. I just wanted to keep playing.” There’s your issue with Fragpunk. The hook here isn’t the fun – though it is fun, no doubt about it. It’s the urge to get dealt another hand. To keep seeing new cards, placing ever-increasing bets of time and attention onto the table, against the constant, incessant ring-ring-ring of one of video games’ most flagrant attempts at fleecing you for every priceless minute you’re worth. No wonder it’s more interested in the flourish of dealing a new hand than it is the actual game itself.