Heckler & Crew

It is a great time to be an FPS fan. Between boomer shooters becoming an entire thriving subgenre of their own, innovative movement and weaponry, and a heap of hybrid genre attempts, you can barely look at Steam or similar without finding an FPS that’s legitimately worth playing. What they largely haven’t been is multiplayer. Maintaining servers and capturing an audience to fill them in the first place is legitimately challenging for indies to pull off. So why not shrink the player count a bit to keep those queue times short? And hey, what about throwing a few booster packs in for good measure?

Let’s start simply: Friends vs Friends is sensory joy. It looks like it was meant to come out on an unreleased Dreamcast 2 and I mean that in the most complimentary way. Its audio is similarly pleasing with a phenomenal OST, informative punchy sound effects in-match, and solid voice acting that gives each character a distinct personality. The game’s premise and tone of friends playing a magical murder card game is fully integrated into its gameplay; you will end up reveling in the sheer amount of ridiculous ways you can kill each other, laughing off losses instead of getting salty, always excited to see what you’ll draw next round.

You couldn’t design a simpler FPS in terms of controls – move, jump, crouch, shoot the default pistol with no ADS. Arenas offer no pickups whatsoever. That’s literally it. This is a shockingly sparse approach in an era of movement-shooters but it works to FvF’s benefit, providing a blank canvas for the game’s main focus: cards. Predictably for any constructed card game, cards break each and every possible rule the game dares to set. Pull a better gun out of thin air, switch on big head mode for your opponents, turn yourself 15 feet tall, nuke the stage to turn it into an open arena, the world is your oyster. Games that rely on card shenanigans for variety need truly varied cards, and FvF delivers to the fullest extent.

Moreso than any card you put into your deck, it’s the tight lobbies that make this game work. 1v1 and 2v2 is the extent of the formats here and that’s very much a good thing. In singles you draw more cards allowing each player to pull off more ridiculous combos, whereas in 2v2 you need to communicate with your partner to time your plays. If this was an 8-player deathmatch it would be impossible to parse, kills happening every which way. Instead you get a tight, intimate affair that’s as chaotic as it is satisfying. It feels like a return to the sort of FPS that got us to crowd our couches for split screen multi back in the day and that’s a wonderful thing.

This is also why the game is much better played, appropriately, with your friends. Queuing with a teammate on voice is a blast, but it’s 4p in-house games where this starts to really feel electric. You will celebrate sick plays no matter which end of them you’re on, and the inherent comedy of the whole affair never lessens. We have a group with players that range from accomplished esports competitor to “plays an FPS once in a while” and thanks to the combination of cardplay and quick thinking we’re all able to compete relatively well. That’s not to say you won’t get stomped in a quick match by a 17 year old who just slammed a bottle of Adderall, but what FPS is that not true of?

I have criticisms, because of course I do. Death can come swiftly and without a kill recap it’s sometimes hard to tell what un-alived you. Progression feels slow (fortunately this is not to make room for microtransactions) with levels not quite coming quickly enough. This is exacerbated by quests with XP rewards not being progressed unless you’re playing in the queue with randos, and individual cards not being unlockable by any means other than pulling them from packs. There are only 4 maps (not counting Nuke) and one of them is awful (Trucks is fine, shut up lol – Kyle). There are a handful of balance issues, with cards and characters that feel above rate or borderline useless.

Fortunately all of these are fixable, and several have been acknowledged by the devs as an area of focus for the near future. Hell, I was going to complain about matches not awarding XP and money if your opponent left but they fixed that while I was editing this piece! The game needs some work and content updates, but its foundations are solid and the devs are only making it better. This is one of the rare cases where giving a game a score feels a bit off as I could very well see the number going up.

It’s almost difficult to not recommend Friends vs Friends if you can get at least one other person to go in on it with you, especially at its price point. The game launched at $6 and will likely hit that again, but even at $10 you’re getting solid value. Will it hold onto a scene long term? No idea, but I’d love to see folks try and I’m happy to participate. If it receives quality content updates, which it’s set to, this could become one of the best games of the year. But even if a bus hits every member of the dev team simultaneously and work stopped today, this innovative little game has provided our group some of the biggest belly laughs of anything 2023 has to offer and warrants a recommendation for that alone.

7/10