It's obvious that Square Enix was inspired by Nintendo's family-friendly Cephalopod starring shooter, Splatoon, when it designed its upcoming game Foamstars. But after going hands-on with the title during this past weekend's Summer Game Fest, I came away surprised and excited for more thanks to just how different it is in practice.
With Foamstars, Square Enix is building a 4x4 shooter for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 that is fast paced, fun, and while accessible still has a surprising amount of depth to the gameplay. Much like in Splatoon, the shooter is as much about territory control as it is taking out your opponents, as covering the arena with foam helps you and your teammates while it slows enemies down.
As a result, the arena we played in (called Bath Vegas - a callout to my home city!), was almost immediately covered in the teal and pink foam from the start. Players can lay down the foam and then "surf" to move through it quickly. Surfing serves a dual purpose as well, as it's what you'll use to either take out an enemy that is laden down with too much foam, or save an ally who is need as well.
In our demo, we played a mode that saw teams needing to reach seven eliminations. Once that happened, the team that was behind would see their best player take the role of Star Player, which gives that player a bit of a buff to make them stronger and harder to take out. Take out the star player, though, and your side wins.
While much of the Splatoon comparison is still apt - your foam helps your mobility while enemy foam slows you down, you cover your opponent in foam to effectively "deal damage" to them (like paint works in Splatoon), the biggest difference is the foam itself.
Unlike Splatoon where it's simply a layer of paint, foam has volume. Foamstars makes great use of this volume to help create a more dynamic - and sometimes chaotic - battlefield.
Foam can be used to cover the floor, or it can be used to build a solid wall to block off a section of the map and funnel opposing to chokepoints to score eliminations easier. Foam can also be used to build your own little base on the battlefield to protect against enemy attacks and regroup for an assault. It adds such a new layer to the formula and it makes for some tricky - yet fun - gameplay.
Oftentimes in my five matches at Summer Game Fest, opposing players would lay down layers upon layers of foam right in my path, forcing a quick direction change when I was surfing. Oftentimes this would lead me right into the crosshairs of a character like Mel T who fires homing foam missles, or the turret of Tonix, which locks on and shoots foam at close proximity enemies.
I would sometimes lay down a massive hill of foam to try to get some height on my opponents, dropping down to slam my surf board into them to score an elimination. This level of battlefield strategy played well especially when playing one of the more long-range or AOE-style characters, like The Baristador. This character can dump tons of foam on the battlefield, laying down a large swathe of territory, or using one of his skills to create a highway of foam to surf down. I found myself creating a wall to protect me then using the Baristador's foam gun to fire an arcing hose of foam over it to cover the enemies in the distance.
I also found the AOE characters were particularly strong, especially Tonix who has an incredibly powerful turret she can lay down to close down an area of the map. Mel T can cover an area quickly with her massive foam rockets, especially since they will lock on to players close enough to her.
I found Soa, the all-arounder my favorite character in the test, though. This could be because she was a bit more balanced than the others, firing of giant foam bubbles with her dual pistols, and her skills can splash a zone with foam thanks to a grenade, or get out of the way while still firing foam with a high-flying jump.
Each fight was fun, fast and fluid, and when it was over I kind of wanted to revisit the booth a few times throughout the day just to get more time with this game. Foamstars might at the outset look like a game trying to be Splatoon, but the gameplay on offer was different and exciting enough to stand on its own two feet without the comparison. It felt like an evolution of the formula, bringing new strategies and ways to play the party shooter.
Leaving Summer Game Fest, though, the first conversation I had with my daughter when I got home was how much they are going to love playing this game. I can't wait to play Foamstars with the family on game nights, and seeing the varied character designs make me really interested in the cosplay takes that could arise from here.
While we only got the chance to play the single multiplayer mode, Star Smash, but the developers say that there will be more multiplayer modes as well as a full single-player mode. While we don't have any more information about the upcoming modes, I'm definitely eager to learn more. Foamstars might be my surprise hit of the show, and I'm not sure I would have said that going into the weekend.
