At the beginning of each round of FragPunk – before characters are picked, before any bombs can be planted or defused, before the first shot is fired – the screen is filled by three cards, drawn at random from a pool of hundreds. If you’ve ever played a draft-format game of Magic: The Gathering or any of its kin, this process may feel familiar. It’s essentially the game tearing open a booster pack and splitting its contents between the two teams, leaving players to build their decks on the fly.
This being a multiplayer FPS rather than a CCG, however, these cards aren’t picked to be played to the table. Instead, they modify the next round’s action, in ways that range from the prosaic, such as boosting a particular damage type or limiting players to melee weapons, to the rather more novel. Infernal Hounds pairs each member of the team with their own attack dog, for example, while King Of Eggs turns you all into layers, able to crouch and squeeze out an edible healing item.
There’s a gleeful sense of invention to these cards that frequently puts us in mind of Magic’s so-called golden rule: “Whenever a card’s text directly contradicts these rules, the card takes precedence”. Don’t like that FragPunk’s movement model doesn’t include a double jump or the sprint-crouch slide that has become an FPS standard in recent years, say? With the right card, you can reinstate them. Just about every variable can be tweaked this way: the length of rounds squashed or stretched, the number of objectives increased or decreased, the environment art reskinned with a layer of frost or squidgy Cronenbergian flesh bits. Getting to rip up the game’s base rules this way is a joy – and perhaps a helpful distraction from just how overfamiliar those rules are to begin with.