Foamstars is to Splatoon what Fortnite was to Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds – a rip-off, yes, but also an admirably brazen one. And one that might actually take a single game and turn it into a whole genre. If it’s very lucky – and also very good.
FoamstarsDeveloper: Square EnixPublisher: Square EnixPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Coming to PS4 and PS5
Maybe unsurprisngyly to anyone who first clocked Square Enix’s Foamstars during last month’s PlayStation showcase, that one’s still debatable. I played a few rounds of it out at Summer Games Fest and can confidently tell you it is not terrible. Like anything competitive played in a room with nine other players it’s immediately engaging, at least, and it does also have quite a clever twist, just as Fortnite’s building was to PUBG’s one-on-one-hundred survival on a shrinking map.
Admittedly it’s a bit less revolutionary: the twist with Foamstars is that it’s purely a game of elimination, at least in the mode I played, and that in order to win you’ll not only need to eliminate more players, but once you do, then eliminate the other team’s best player, marked out with a star and then naturally, immediately surrounded by protective teammates.
It might not be a revolutionary take on competitive shooting, but it does make for a weirdly significant difference, the playground house-rules twist that takes a typical game and makes it kind of magic. The difference itself is that Foamstars’ rounds have a kind of gravity to them – suddenly, after a couple of minutes doing your own thing, both teams have a focal point, rather than the consuming personal battles over a single corner of turf you might find in Splatoon. It creates a very rudimentary kind of wordless, short-term teamwork that other PvP shooters have struggled with for an age.