Yeah, ‘FragPunk’ Is a Lot of Fun, but It’s Also the Final Boss of a Live-Service Nightmare

Another day, another moment spent wrestling the moral dilemma between an engaging game and its questionable practices. I spent a bit of time playing FragPunk this weekend, Bad Guitar Studios’ (a subsidiary under NetEase) new off-the-walls tactical shooter. It’s a wild approach to the 5v5 competitive shooter genre. Something akin to CS:GO or Valorant, injected with arcadey chaos and a slick glitch-pop flair. It’s fun, exciting, and fresh — but damn, is it steeped in some of the worst live-service slop I’ve ever seen.

On the surface, ‘FragPunk’ is a fresh spin on competitive fps games

On gameplay alone, FragPunk slaps. It’s the standard tac shooter setup — two teams fight to either plant a bomb or stop the other from doing so. Like Valorant, it’s also part hero shooter, with a cast of ‘Lancers’ and a wide selection of abilities. On top of that, there’s the Shard Card system, arguably FragPunk‘s most notable trait on the table. At the start of each round, both teams select up to three cards, which radically change the way a round plays out. In one round, the enemies may have comically enlarged heads. In the next, one bomb site may be covered in a thick fog. Some cards cause your weapons to fire off randomly, while others increase your maximum health pool after squatting a certain number of times.

It’s a fantastic balance between the competitive nature of tac shooters and the arcade goofiness of Bulletstorm and Unreal Tournament. And, if you focus solely on queueing up and ignore the rest of FragPunk, that’s great! Though, let me remind you, this is a NetEase game, so good luck navigating through its UI without the endless number of proverbial billboards in your way. I don’t know how we got here, exactly, when live-service games became the equivalent of a swarm of fleas you can’t seem to shoo away from your face. But alas, here we are.

..and then you get to its main menu screen

FragPunk currently has nine in-game currencies. Let me repeat that: FragPunk has NINE CURRENCIES. There’s Gold to unlock Lancers, Glunite Coins to buy rare items, and FragPunk coins that you buy with real money. But don’t forget: there are also Club Tokens for joining a clan, Ranked Coins for playing ranked matches, Battle Pass tokens for purchasing the premium pass, and Membership Picks, because FragPunk even has a monthly subscription you can buy. Hey, it has Gacha elements, too! So, of course, there’s a separate currency for pulling items off its various Gacha banners.

Every menu in FragPunk has two to three additional sub-menus to click through, all waving a shiny “New!” indicator over them when there’s something new to click. And there’s always something new to click, between its multiple pages of challenges, achievements, collections, events, and progress bars. Virtually everything has some sort of progression bar tacked onto it, which would be impressive if it weren’t so mind-numbingly overdone.

To its credit, FragPunk has an unbelievable amount of customization options available. Stickers, charms, and skins allow you nearly endless expression in how both your guns and player banners look. I really enjoy this, enough to where I almost considered buying the battle pass! But I remember, even when initially booting up the game, that there was something off about the artwork.

suspicions grow over ‘FragPunk’s questionable artwork

My suspicions were further bolstered when TheGamer reported on FragPunk‘s alleged use of AI artwork. Where, in certain splash art, characters exhibit the usual red flags of generative AI art, like missing fingers. Digging a little deeper, it seems FragPunk may even be using AI to create items sold through its battle pass. Because, you know, having machines steal a human’s art while depriving them of work is one thing. Now, companies get to (allegedly) sell that stolen art right back to you! Awesome.

Currently, FragPunk sits at a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam. Though that isn’t stopping a flood of negative reviews from hitting its store page. While many players are unhappy with its radical change from its previous beta, others refuse to support its egregious monetization schemes and potential use of AI artwork.