The company has announced that Foamstars’ next season, titled Party Goes On!, will be its last. Kicking off on December 13 and running until January 17, the season will bring several gameplay improvements that are “all aimed at ensuring players can continue to enjoy the game for the foreseeable future”, while later on Square Enix also plans to hold the Foamstars Cup, which it describes as “a series of in-game events named after each character.”

After the end of its next season, Foamstars will remain online and playable, and though it won’t receive new content, though several services will still remain active. Ranked parties will turn into the aforementioned Foamstars Cup, while Square Enix will also Extreme Parties held in rotation every Saturday. The in-game shop will remain live and will update its recommended page every day, while daily and weekly challenges will also be provided.

Additionally, battle passes for all previous seasons will also be made available, and players will be able to swap between their passes at any time.

Foamstars is available on PS5 and PS4 for free.

“Diamond Jam” features a pretty sizable amount of new content, including Diamond Trade, where players can collect Diamond Chips and exchange them for items. Smash the Star also gets five new maps, four in Rubber Duck Party and one in Extreme Party. There are also new boss battles in Squad Missions, which grant unique rewards.

Those who bought Foamstars or claimed it on PlayStation Plus from February 6th to March 5th will receive the Legacy Gifts DLC. It contains “limited” items like 12 Bubble Beastie Skins with an exclusive color variant, a Legacy title, and a slideboard design.

The next season is slated for November 8th and adds a new Smash the Star map and boss for Squad Mission. Stay tuned for more details, and check out our review for the base game.

Season 4 will bring a host of new content to Foamstars, including three new maps, new Extreme Parties, and new seasonal skins, among other things. As the season’s name might indicate, the new cosmetics that will be available as part of the season will likely have a more sci-fi, futuristic aesthetic.

Foamstars is currently on the tail end of its third season, Mysterious Swing. The season brought with it Chloe Noir as a playable character, along with new Extreme Parties, and features like new limited-time playlists like Ranked Party Tribe-Vibe and Ranked Party Lonestar.

Foamstars is available on PS4 and PS5. For more details about the team-based multiplayer title, check out our review.

Chloe utilizes a rifle with charged shots and a bubble beast, Ciel, to chase down weak foes. She’s available for free by reaching Tier 31 in the Season Pass, but purchasing the Premium Pass unlocks her immediately. The Season Pass includes new skins for Mel T and Jet Justice alongside other cosmetics.

The season also revamps bubble gems, classifying them into Star Gems and adding a fourth slot for Skill Gems. These enhance a Foamstar’s skills and Superstar ability in different ways and require Energy Stones to make. Other features include Ranked Party Tribe-Vibe for teams from April 12th to 19th and Ranked Party Lonestar from April 19th to May 16th for solo players.

Two new Extreme Parties also arrive, including All Chloe Party, where all players control Chloe and Bubbly Penguin, with Penny Gwyn as the only playable Foamstar. The catch with the latter is that only her skills and Superstar ability are usable. Stay tuned for more details on Season 3: Mysterious Swing when it goes live later this week.

Foamstars is available for PS4 and PS5. Check out our review here.

The new season also brings two new Extreme Party modes. All Coiff Guy Party, as the name implies, sees all players in the lobby controlling only Coiff Guy. Super Duel Party is more serious and provides a 1v1 match with no support from your teammates on the outside.

For PvE players, a new Foamstar Mission sees Dark Ramzey entering the fray as a new boss battle. Players must take it down, dodging its projectiles while riding the foam. There will also be new seasonal skins, though which are tied to the Premium Battle Pass is unknown.

Stay tuned for more details on Season 2 in the coming days. Foamstars is available for PS4 and PS5 and is free for PlayStation Plus subscribers until March 4th. Check out our review here to see if it’s worth playing.

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.

Foamstars offers three PvP modes – Smash the Star, Happy Bath Survival and Rubber Duck Party – with multiple maps to dive into. Akin to Splatoon, players spray foam throughout the arena for faster traversal while hindering the opposing team. The difference is that each character has unique abilities and Ultimates. For those who aren’t competitively-inclined, solo and co-op PvE modes are also available.

Season 1: Starry Pop is also live and will offer Ranked Matches soon, with limited-time events and Happy Friyay Parties (for testing upcoming characters) also coming up. Square Enix is planning at least a year of free content, including new characters, skins, limited-time modes, maps and more. Head here for more details, and stay tuned for further updates.

It offers a new playable character, a new Extreme Party, more than 20 new skins and a Foamstar Mission Update. Season 3 starts in mid-April and offers much of the same content, but Season 4, beginning in mid-May, adds three new maps instead of a new character. Thanks to Happy Friyay Party, however, players can try out the next Foamstar during the season.

Season 6 onwards will add a new character, game mode, maps, skins, Extreme Party and more. The length of seasons and their dates could change, so keep that in mind for the future.

Foamstars is out on PS4 and PS5 next week and will also be available for PlayStation Plus subscribers until March 4th. It also features single-player and co-op modes, with potentially more content added over time. Head here for more details.

On the PlayStation Blog, producer Kosuke Okatani revealed that Ranked Party has solo and team options, with players competing to rank up in seven tiers – Bronze Star, Silver Star, Gold Star, Platinum Star, Diamond Star, Superstar, and Party Legend.

Each season will also have limited-time events on two weekends with different rulesets. Season 1 features Mirror Madness, where all players are the character Mel T, and Invisible Showdowns, which renders everyone invisible.

Another unique feature is Happy Friyay Party, available twice a month on the weekends and allowing players to try out the next Foamstar (in this case, Coiff Guy). A Season Pass with free and Premium Tiers is also confirmed, and there will be seasonal skins to purchase, though players can also unlock free skins.

Foamstars launches on February 6th and will be free for PlayStation Plus subscribers. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

Foamstars is a new 4v4 party shooter from Square Enix featuring three PvP modes and multiple playable characters. It’s drawn comparisons to Nintendo’s Splatoon but received positive impressions from its last open beta. Single-player and co-op content is included, and there are plans for at least a year of post-launch support.

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