Gaming

What if, while playing a competitive shooter, you could force your opponents to fire their weapon every five seconds, even when they're trying to camp in a corner? What if you could instantly teleport them back to their spawn when they take damage? What if you could toss aside a weapon to turn it into a mini-turret?

Every match Fragpunk tosses out half a dozen gimmicks that could anchor entire videogames with its incredible Shard Card system: The more than 150 cards in the game offer a variety of buffs, debuffs, and outlandish abilities with the game-breaking power of old-school cheat codes. It’s an adrenaline shot for a genre often obsessed with creating a balanced experience. Instead, Fragpunk is all about letting players break the rules to swing matches in their favor.

While Fragpunk takes the basic formula of Counter-Strike and Valorant, with each 5v5 Shard Clash match consisting of defenders protecting a bomb site and attackers trying to plant the bomb, matches are much shorter. Quick play is the first to four round wins, and ranked is the first to six. This gives each match an urgency that pairs well with the unpredictable cards and slightly faster pace: You don’t reach a point where you're seeing the same card combinations or rounds grow to be samey, like everyone saving money to slow-push into a bomb site with Vandal rifles in Valorant or snipe down the central path in Dust2 in CS:GO.