Now that I've 100%'ed FOAMSTARS, I have a new perspective. Splatoon and Foamstars have 98% of the same ingredients, but FOAMSTARS’s sulfates and parabens leave you with a less volumetric, healthy looking shine.

FOAMSTARS is the first game I’ve played which is designed entirely around selling people a “season pass” and it’s very informative about how these games work and why gamers are so angry at them all the time.

The honeymoon period was great, largely because it’s a decent game that’s ""“Free”"". What was a pick-up-and-play game with the promise of something new after every milestone has gotten less exciting now that it takes approximately as long to find a match as it takes to play the game. When you’re waiting almost 6 minutes to play a game that has a 6 minute timer but usually lasts 3-4 minutes, I don’t think it will be around long. Considering the game came out less than 2 weeks ago, I wouldn’t expect to be playing it in 2025.

At this stage the game is all about player engagement. They do this by dangling a list of 40 unlockable items that are changed out every 5 weeks. The first 15 levels were easy and fast to get, But slowly and surely, the grind got longer to the point where you probably need to play for 15-20 hours to unlock everything in a given “season pass”. This is a pretty unreasonable thing to ask of a normal person. So I think they give you the best items at the beginning (new character if you pay) and the middle (around where exp grinding gets annoying), and something at the end (new character if you don’t pay) that it makes you feel like you’re missing out on something of value if you don’t organize your life around the game. For players who do pay for a $6 season pass, their reward for the grinding is in the form of a skin which retails at an absurd $45 USD. It's all artificial value, they could have just sold that skin and everything in the season pass for $6 and it wouldn't seem like a "deal". People are buying and unlocking these things, even though everyone looks the same when they’re covered in foam.

For those of us who don’t want to fork out $6 a month to play the same game we’re alerady playing for free, you miss out on “content”, mostly in the form of emotes and junk skins like new colors of your surf board or your weapon or a neon light that appears on your back. These are even more trivial than the character skins, but I don’t think people actually care what these rewards are or do, it’s more that they are unlocking something for a hard day’s work in the foam mines. It’s like a transactional relationship between the player and the game.

Meanwhile I paid $40 USD for Splatoon 3 and can safely say unlocking stuff in that game isn’t the focus. The actual gameplay is why you’re there, and the cosmetics are just nice to have and largely forgettable. I am sort of ‘working toward’ getting better dualies but it’s so that I can play the game better, not just so that my character does a unique fortnite dance in the select screen. There’s also much more thought put into its single player and alternative game modes. Having the peace of mind that I’ll be able to put down Splatoon for a month, a year, three years and still have a complete experience is far preferable to the idea that if I don’t play the game for 20 hours this month I won’t unlock Mel T. as a playable character.

I never played or had interest in a live service game before and suspected it was bad, but the reward incentives seem like a very an unhealthy way to spend one’s time. I think I will wash my hands of Foamstars…. without soap.

This is what corporate art looks like. It's so approachable by design that it feels hollow. The theming is bizarre, the cheerful bubblegum pop aesthetics feel uncanny, and stuff like "FriYAY" and "replacing kills with chills" feels like it was workshopped by all the most out of touch colleagues in your office trying to make something safe for the Fortnite generation. There's also a strange confluence of different art styles from the crisp 3D to the flat fiverr-style animated segments, to the literal photographs of wildlife that is incorporated as portraits and album art.

The whole experience feels blatently KPI driven. Any pretense that you're playing something that wasn't cooked up by corporate suits is stripped away when you see the $45 fee for a skin. In a way it's a unique artistic vision, in that, it feels so heavily designed as a set of deliverables by project managers and made for business users.

As a result, it's not quite the next evolution of Splatoon that it wants to be. The single player game modes are where the game hooked me but it's very short and leaves a bit to be desired. Not sure how balanced the PvP is. It's very chaotic, and there are some odd design choices such as a game mode reliant on your team's star player to stay alive and there's a game over condition when they die. Overall, It's a servicable game and the fun is there, but it's not as interesting as it could be. The game feels like it's targeting such a wide audience that it's meaningless.