Foamstars Review – Fairly Fun Foam-Filled Experience

At first glance, Foamstars might feel like a game that’s destined to be grand success on account of its Splatoon inspired gameplay and colorful art style, but it soon becomes clear that a lot of its potential has been squandered. Having said that, does Foamstars have a few merits that are worth appreciating? Or are those “strengths” enough to keep you interested in for more than a couple of hours at best?

Foamstars starts out simple, a snappy tutorial that takes you through the basics of movement and combat. You can run around and jump, and you can use your primary weapon to shoot up foam that will temporarily stick to the ground. You can use the left trigger to instantly summon a surfboard beneath your feet and use that to gracefully glide along foam, and you can also pile up the foam to reach high spots.

The player has access to slots for three distinct abilities, two of which are special moves that operate on a shorter cooldown and can be activated by a press of the left or right trigger, while the last one is an ultimate move that has a longer cooldown and can be activated with a press of the triangle button.

This forms the majority of Foamstars’ maneuverability systems, and despite its simplistic nature, it’s fun to interact with them on a basic level. The movement is pretty responsive thanks to smooth animations, but I do feel that the characters move a bit too slowly, and getting from one end of the map to the next can take too long. While you have to use the surfboard to speed up that process, it would have been nice to have faster movement speeds or even a sprint button to close short gaps quickly.

"The movement is pretty responsive thanks to smooth animations, but I do feel that the characters move a bit too slowly, and getting from one end of the map to the next can take too long."

Once you are done with the tutorial, you could jump right into the multiplayer or dabble within the single-player aspect of Foamstars. I jumped into the latter first, and to be honest, there isn’t really much on offer here. You basically get a set of three missions per character to help you come to grips with the character’s move set, and that’s about it. The game tries to keep things interesting by adding some story tidbits, but the writing is extremely basic to the point that it feels directed towards younger audiences which meant I was skipping all bland dialogue whenever I got the chance.

As for the missions themselves, they revolve around completing and clearing out waves upon waves of enemies while trying to save a energy core (a glorified capture point) from the clutches of the opposition and rinse and repeat until you are done with the character. The game throws different kinds of enemies at you, but the strategy for defeating them is pretty similar so it all ends up being a really uninteresting experience.

"I tried hopping on a match with a partner, and the enemies’ presence felt a bit too overwhelming for the two of us to handle and their encounters generally felt like they were designed with four concurrent players at a time."

Foamstars also offers the option to take up missions with a partner in co-op mode, which fares a bit better than the single-player offerings. You and three other players can team up while trying to save the energy core from devastation, but the enemy variety is a lot better in this mode which ensures you and your partners play off each other’s strengths and come up with interesting tactics on the fly. It can get really chaotic which can make for some fun moments, but the number of enemies present on the screen doesn’t seem to scale up or down with the number of players at a given time.

I tried hopping on a match with a partner, and the enemies’ presence felt a bit too overwhelming for the two of us to handle and their encounters generally felt like they were designed with four concurrent players at a time. I should also mention that I was playing on the normal difficulty, so there is definitely a bit of a balance issue on this front if you are playing with less than three other people at a given time.

Jumping over to the multiplayer side of things, Foamstars’ biggest attraction is the Smash The Star game mode, which is a 5v5 deathmatch with a neat twist. So basically, each team has to get a number of kills (or chills as the game calls it), and once that goal is reached, a star appears on top of the most active player in the match. The first one to knock out the star player scores a win which makes for an interesting spin on the team deathmatch formula resulting into a constant neck-to-neck experience.

Foamstars has a decent roster of characters to choose from, and each of these characters have different weapons and abilities. So, each character plays a different role in the playground. Soa is an all-rounder while the vicious Rave Breaker works well in a support role, while Jet Justice is a tank with strong weapons and defensive capabilities. In theory, you could take up different roles and work towards achieving shared goals but things rarely go to plan amidst the heat of battle. Everything ends up just meshing with one another which can occasionally cause frustrations, and I think this issue could also be attributed to the fact that I mostly participated in team matches with random people. So, your mileage might vary.

"Foamstars is a game where you might feel like it could be a really fun time when you are starting out, but it soon starts wear thin with little to no substance to keep you hooked in the long run."

There are other modes as well, including but not limited to Rubber Duck Party where you escort a payload to the destination while fending off the opponent team, and Happy Bath Survival which is essentially a 2v2 elimination game mode. I didn’t get the opportunity to fully explore these two modes largely due to the plethora of matchmaking issues that plague Foamstars’ multiplayer component. I suffered from long queue times, high network ping, and even multiple disconnects from matches despite operating on a stable high-speed connection. It’s obviously a big issue for players who are queuing up and the developer should do the needful to resolve these glaring shortcomings.

Things don’t fare too well on the player progression side either, with payouts being extremely meager, requiring you to grind out matches to level up and gain access to shiny new cosmetics which thankfully don’t have impact on gameplay.

In conclusion, Foamstars is a game where you might feel like it could be a really fun time when you are starting out, but it soon starts wear thin with little to no substance to keep you hooked in the long run. And that’s a shame because Foamstars could have captured the Splatoon market if it could have spent some more time in the oven. As it stands now, Foamstars is a middling-quality product with some neat ideas and because it’s free to download through PS Plus. You can try it out with friends but know that chances of you sticking around are pretty slim.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.