Just by virtue of being brightly coloured and fun instead of grimy and serious, Foamstars was one of the most memorable games in this week’s PlayStation Showcase. It has stayed lodged in our brains long after the memories of the shadowy shooters have faded, but it’s also catching some heat. Foamstars is just a Splatoon rip-off, comes the cry from the gallery. But is that really a bad thing?
Obviously the most interesting games will do something fresh. The reason Breath of the Wild resonated so strongly with people was because its philosophy on exploration had never been done before. Copycats don’t tend to evoke the same response. Even if you play the copy before the original, there’s always a spectre lurking within the rip-off, a ghost of shamelessness that belies the lack of creativity and original thought. Games that only want to copy others and cash in on trends often feel soulless, and tend to be poor problem-solvers: it’s a tactic for avoiding original ideas, so when ideas are needed, they come up short.
This could well be the case with Foamstars. It might just be Splatoon with soap, and if so I’ll be the first to call it out. But I think it’s a little soon to dismiss it. After all, most of the shooters these days are laser-infused live-service titles with weapon upgrades that offer incremental percentage boosts like Destiny. Either that or they straddle the line of tense realism and fast-paced arcade action like Call of Duty. Games learn from each other all of the time. So is Foamstars copying Splatoon, or learning from it?
While we can’t know until the game is out, I’m inclined to hope it’s the latter. Splatoon is not just a popular video game, it invented a new genre. Though it uses classic shooter mechanics of aiming and firing, the aim of covering the battlefield in your team’s colours and exploring every inch of the map, rather than camping and killing, is a revelation. It’s a surprise Nintendo managed to get a whole trilogy out before anyone took a serious swing at copying the idea.
It comes down to how much a game owns its concept. Does anyone really care that Fortnite ‘ripped off’ PUBG these days? Is every FPS ‘just a Wolfenstein clone’? We use Roguelike, Soulslike, and Metroidvania as terms of endearment, because we know the importance of games building on successful ideas in order for the medium to develop.
These namesakes are not the originators though. Rogue was not the first Roguelike - the game that first came along and built on the formula was. Foamstars could be that for Splatoon. We could be talking about Splatlikes in the years to come, although hopefully we’ll have a better name because that sounds disgusting.
Square Enix hasn’t done much recently to deserve the benefit of the doubt: I can easily conceive of a reality where Foamstars is a charmless copycat with nothing to say and we all go on with our lives. But if you like Splatoon, you should want this to do well. You should want Foamstars to offer new ideas and prove that the Splatlike is a viable genre. The shooter market needs a shake up, with Splatoon an outsider to it all. If Foamstars transforms it into a foundational inspiration, everybody wins.
Foamstars has the advantage of standing out from the crowd after the Showcase, even if general reception to it has been lukewarm. When it arrives, it will need to avoid going the way of so many underbaked shooters from companies best known for single-player games, or else it will break up on entry. But if it can stick the landing, the Splatlike could be born. We really need to come up with a new name though.