Bubbly fun
Foamstars feels a bit out of left field for Square Enix. A multiplayer shooter may not be all that strange; after all, the publisher did make a battle royale based on Final Fantasy VII. But this isn’t a straightforward shooter. Foamstars features stylish fighters rather than grizzled warriors and suds instead of bullets.
We had a chance to play Foamstars at Summer Game Fest 2023, getting in a decent number of matches. The easiest comparison point for the game is Splatoon, and not just due to the vicious, viscous warfare waged on each of their battlefields. Both games look at territory as an important factor in winning the day and see the firepower you employ as both utility and knockout power. That said, some similarities are a little obvious.
Characters have primary weapons that can dispense foam in different methods. The foam builds up and spreads out across the empty arena, creating avenues of ingress for teams to move around in by holding the left trigger to “surf” on the bubbles. Surfing is how you KO enemies that have their health depleted and pick allies back up after they’ve been knocked down. And much like Nintendo’s squid splatfest, you can move quickly across your own foam but get bogged down and sluggish in the enemy bubbles.
The knockout system is already an interesting twist on this style of shooter. By adding this Kill Confirmed-style method of taking out an enemy, it encourages risk. Foamstars wants you to push a bit farther, err away from caution, and get yourself into scramble situations.
House of suds
Where the foam differs from the ink is how it piles up. The bubbles don’t paint surfaces. They stick to them and build up. You can build walls and new avenues of attack, lending a Z-axis to the movement and action.
Characters’ special skills emphasize these attacks. Some can quickly build lanes for attacking or put up a wall for blocking the other team off. Having “hero characters” lets each of them operate a little differently and focus on certain goals. I had a blast playing the short-range fighter who was mobile and wielded a bubble shotgun.
But other characters can launch shots over walls, or hit from long range, helping to deal with strategic foam emplacements. Finding ways to attack or escape feels rewarding, and even when the pile of suds can sometimes feel a little hard to read, Foamstars feels like it pushes players to move toward each other and fight.
These little moments of interplay, where teams are trying to strike and defend in equal measure, feel tense. Rather than holding down territory, KOs are the focus—the mode we played, Smash the Star, tasked each team with securing 7 knockouts, then knocking out the Star (best player) on the enemy team for the win. So while securing the battlefield wasn’t required to win, it did make a big difference when my team was trying to defend our Star or attack the enemy’s, or both at the same time.
Popping the bubble
While the makeshift foam arena feels interesting, the actual battlefield we played on was sparse. I’m unsure if that’s on purpose, too. It definitely encourages Foamstars players to build up and out, but it makes the actual map less memorable. Outside of some elevation jutting out in some areas, our field was pretty much just a big, open circle.
My big hesitancy isn’t with the arenas, though, but with the model itself. I asked, but didn’t get a clear answer, on whether Foamstars will be free-to-play or premium. During our presentation, there was a mention of single-player content, but Square Enix wasn’t talking about that just yet. There are also modes we didn’t get to see, aside from the Smash the Star option.
All that is to say, I think there’s an interesting idea here. It doesn’t feel like Square Enix is directly lifting the territory-control shooter model but putting its own spin on it with a building-and-battling twist. The characters are colorful and interesting, and there’s a good variety of firing types and skills to make the combat feel varied in each encounter.
It’s the big picture I’m curious about. Foamstars could be something worth dipping into and adding to the slate of Weekend Games with a squad of friends, but I think a lot of that will depend on what more the team has in store beyond the one mode and map I played at Summer Game Fest 2023.
