"If this game lives to see the summer of 2025, I will be incredibly shocked."

Between bad controls, mediocre map design, characters that feel more like Vtuber avatars than actual characters, boring multiplayer modes, tedious combat, horrible visual noise, and terrible business practices including terrible microtransactions and AI art, Foamstars is a game that is an absolute mess that people are complaining about for the wrong reasons.

You guys hate this game for being a "Splatoon Ripoff." I hate it because it's just an awful video game. We are not the same.

I kind of fuck with foamstars? The foundation is definitely there, it feels like a cross between a hero shooter and splatoon and I like the foam mechanic, it adds a bit more verticality plus having to confirm your kills (or save a teammate) by sliding into someone is a nice touch. It just doesn't feel as polished as splatoon, despite being nice aesthetically and having a surprisingly good soundtrack. Since this is a square enix game, be ready for expensive DLC cosmetics and for this game to be dead in less than a year. If they didn't launch on ps plus it would have been dead on arrival.

Also lmao at "we don't kill in this game... we chill!!"

Mildly fun for a bit but gets repetitive too quickly due to how little content their is. PS+ giving this for free is the only reason to play cause it's so filled to the brim with overpriced microtransactions. This is a good example of potential lost to greed. This game could turn into something great with the right direction but ultimately I'm expecting it to stay the same until eventually it gets shut down cause no one is going to buy a $40 skin in a game that's already pay to play and has minimalistic content.

I love how this builds on the Splatoon formula, adding an extra element of verticality through foam that stacks and builds up walls and ramps throughout the map which players surf upon and can launch off to smoothly transition into their attacks. There's this wonderful flow to it all that has me gushing about Foamstars to my friends already. The amount of things to do is somewhat lacking which is particularly unfortunate given that the series this pulls from has the same problem, but I have some hope this will outgrow the issue since Nintendo is particularly awful at supporting multiplayer-focused games and it really wouldn't take all that much to pass em up there.

The missions are basically glorified character tutorials with constant dialogue on top, but they're such goofy fun and each of the character designs are so good that I was happy to play through all of them before hopping back into multiplayer. All of the cute girls make my gay little heart sing. A particular highlight is Penny Gwyn fucking killing corporate executives to save her family of penguins in Antarctica from climate change.

Rating and general thoughts are subject to change as while I did get plenty of multiplayer in, this is just a completion log for finishing the single player missions. That was just day 1, after all.

It's fine. A perfectly playable GAAS shooter. Character designs are strong and visuals are very nice, but the game is embarrassingly bare at launch, and if not for the fact that it's currently a free Day 1 PSPlus download for the month, definitely wouldn't be worth the $30. All modes have better versions in Splatoon except for one pretty fun mode. Happy Bath Survival is a 4 V 4 mode where 2 of the teammates from each side face off in a simple elimination match while the other 2 members of the team assist the players from the top of the stage, helping them slow down opponents with their foam, or helping your team clear a faster path for them. It's simple, but it's able to be fun enough to want to play multiple times and show that it can do its own thing from Splatoon. Unfortunately the game doesn't really do anything else to convince you it's a different experience. Don't look to this game for its single player content, because you can get through all of it in about 2-2 and a half hours. It's just a slightly extended tutorial for each characters playstyle where you spend about 8-10 minutes per level shooting down waves of evil bubble animals while you protect a generator. After each level you gain points that can be used to make your weapons more powerful against the waves, and you get different ranks depending on how well you did, but the difficulty is already ridiculously easy that you'll never have the need to ever upgrade you weapon or try for a better rank in the stage, because odds are you'll just get the S+ rank on your first time. Also, wha on earth is the purpose of having Ai generated art for your unlockable music albums? You have an incredibly talented art team as it is. The fully hand drawn pictures you get for completing a characters story mode are really nice and really show the talent of your team. For gods sake, the deafult character is a fucking Pop Star. You're telling me youd rather Ai generate a shitty tiger or dance floor rather than use your talented artists to make actual in game album art FEATURING YOUR POP STAR CHARACTER YOU DESIGNED? THERES NOT EVEN THAT MANY ALBUMS RIGHT NOW. IT REALLY WOULDNT HAVE TAKEN ANY LONGER OR COSTED MORE. THERE IS NO POINT IN USING THE AI GENERATED ART WHEN IT ALSO CLASHES HEAVILY WITH THE ART STYLE. AT the end of the day Foamstars is just a lesser Splatoon pushed out by Square Enix desperately trying to capitalize off the already dying Games as a Service model by making a lesser Splatoon that'll probably be announcing its end of life service 8 months to a year from now.

review in progress, but I vibe with this kinda? Foamstars is a really bizarre game in a lot of ways, and that's most of what makes it so weird is what I like about it? First up, there's this entire map editor for your training area that can only be accessed through interacting with one kinda random element of the lobby. Then there's the incredibly barebones, weirdly slice-of-lifey singleplayer that they spun into a PvE mode with exactly two stages and difficulties with small rogue-lite elements, which is really random but also kinda fun, actually. Also, one collectible is just fake ads the game auto-plays in the lobby consisting of like two still images (that play for up to two minutes). And then there's just the entire aesthetic of the game, which to me looks incredibly trashy in all its over-produced glamor. It's bare-bones and probably quite cheaply made, feeling a little amateurish at times. There's not a lot of content here, but what is there just feels bizarre, like you stumbled upon a closed beta for a five-year old game that's mysteriously still up and running. Which means I'm actually quite suprised that the gameplay is this fun? I like the idea of three-dimensional foam as a twist on the Splatoon-formula, maybe after the "fucking around and finding out"-phase the player base will actually find strategic uses for stacking foam. I dunno, it's just a bizarre game with quite a fun gameplay loop that is definitely going to get shut down within this year, so I'll savour it for as long as I can!

Alright, I downloaded it, played a couple sessions, popped a couple of trophies, and I'm out.

Look, I don't think it's necessarily bad, I just don't think I'm the target audience at all. Certain elements about it seem pretty polished. The gameplay ranges from alright to kinda frustrating depending on which character you play with.

But yeah, not for me. Moving on.

It's fun for like 20 minutes, but the game just feels kind of empty after that. There are a few things that I actually like, like how you need to confirm a kill by ramming into them, building up cover with foam, or the 2D art for most of the characters, but that's really it. It's a pretty basic hero shooter that "borrowed" a few of Splatoon's mechanics without really understanding how they work. All the characters have these really big shots with a large spread, which makes sense for spreading foam over the ground, but since foam basically doesn't matter outside of moving slightly faster, covering enemy foam with your own is nowhere near as important as inking over your enemy's turf in Splatoon is. The same goes for the foam boards which replace squid mode, as they basically just let you move a little faster than normal but don't come with any of the other bonuses of squid mode like camouflage or ammo recovery. As far as modes go, there's a basic team death match that kind of reminds me of Kid Icarus Uprising's multiplayer in the sense that you whittle down the enemy team until a marked player appears, a standard payload mode, and a really basic horde mode that feels more like a tower defense game in terms of enemy distribution than a real horde kind of thing (there might be more but the second mode cycles just like Splatoon's ranked modes and I'm not playing any more of this to see if there are any more modes.The game also only has a total of eight characters, one of which is locked behind the paid battle pass in a paid game (yeah it's free on PS+ this month but after that it'll be $30.)

Also the game's cosmetic shop just prices everything with real money. Normally there's at least some level of abstraction in games like this, even if it's just needing to use proprietary fun bux instead of your local currency. That's the kind of egregious business decision I've come to expect both from Square and from this kind of perpetually online live service shooter, but it's still really funny to see them be upfront about asking $10.99 for a recolor of one of these generic characters and up to $45 for one of the "premium" skin bundles.

Like The First Soldier, this game probably won't even last a year.

TL;DR: Foamstars sucks big balls and isn't going to last 12 months

This isn't a Splatoon ripoff, if all Foamstars ended up being was "soulless Splatoon on PS5", I would actually recommend it because Nintendo online sucks balls.

But Foamstars is simply heavily inspired by Splatoon, without nabbing any of the fundamental ideas that make it work so well from its proverbial easter basket. For one, painting the map in foam is a secondary objective in the way getting kills in a Splatoon turf war is secondary to map coverage. This is a mistake, as it leads players to priortize zerg rushing a single player, terrain be damned to cheese a kill. And since the amount of lives a team gets is pathetically low, isolating and picking off individual players as one homogenous blob of DPS is the winning method in every mode.

The game is way too chaotic and messy to employ different playstyles other than pure aggression, because when its as hard as it is to notice a dying team mate flashing on your hud, imagine trying to work a healer into the game.

The game is fine aethestically. The character designs are bland and forgettable, nothing can be customized without ridiculous 15 dollar skins (remember when earning these randomly for free in a loot crate was outrageous?) and the map designs are gaudy and hard on the eyes. The music isn't my cup of tea, but I can see people liking it if they like the Splatoon music. (I know you guys exist...right?)

When the core gameplay is as fucked as it is, nothing can save Foamstars from its inevitable early grave. Taking Splatoon and focusing on kills rather than teamwork and making the PvP as awkward and gross to play as it is means the game is broken at its core. And don't get me started on the payload mode, where I went 15-1 and pushed the cart but didn't feel like I contributed at all since game is visual diarrhea.

Foamstars is one of many Square Enix games that is so soulless its hard to imagine anyone pitching the idea in the first place, except a boring Japanese sod who works 16 hours a day.

"Mom, I want Splatoon!"
"We have Splatoon at home!"
Splatoon at home:

Okay, in all seriousness, the moment-to-moment gameplay has some good ideas, but everything else around it is hideous. And unlike Splatoon, which actually had a good campaign, this game's single-player component is laughable.