Frog Sqwad
Panic Stations · Panic Stations
“A five-dollar frog that croaks more than it leaps, but somehow you'll love it anyway.”
Sally's not done with you yet.
Drop a URL, screenshot, or file and Sally will give you the honest truth.
The Review
Panic Stations, a studio that has existed for about as long as a presidential approval rating, built Frog Sqwad in under twelve months and had the audacity to ship it, price it at $4.99, and put it on Game Pass all at once. That is either the most confident move in indie history or a very organized panic attack. You built a slapstick co-op extraction platformer about sticky-tongued frogs hauling garbage through procedurally shifting sewers to please a 'Swamp King,' and somehow that sentence makes complete sense in 2026. Respect, genuinely.
The problem, dear Panic Stations, is that your tongue is lying to you. Players are reporting that the core mechanic, the sticky grapple tongue that is literally the entire point of being a frog, behaves with the consistency of a toddler throwing spaghetti at a wall. Your demo was sitting at 86% Very Positive from 254 reviews. Your full launch dropped to 75% Mostly Positive from 99 reviews. That is not a glow-up. That is your frog slipping off a wet pipe and blaming physics. The physics that you shipped.
Here is the thing though: you are a brand-new studio, this is your first game, it costs less than a pint in your home country of the UK, and it is on Game Pass day one. The bones are genuinely fun, the concept is stupid in the best way, and if you fix the tongue physics in a patch or two, Frog Sqwad could easily become the kind of game people are still dragging their unwilling friends into a year from now. You have a frog worth saving. Please save it.
What It Nails
- +Game Pass day-one pricing strategy: at $4.99 with immediate Game Pass inclusion, the barrier to dragging seven friends into a sewer is basically zero, and that is the smartest move a first-time studio could make.
- +The concept is weaponized chaos: procedurally shifting sewers, food hauling, a tyrannical Swamp King, and the promise of becoming a Megafrog. This is exactly the kind of unhinged premise that makes people clip and post screenshots without any marketing spend.
- +Simultaneous PC and Xbox Series X/S launch with no staggered nonsense, confirmed at the Xbox Partner Preview in March 2026. You shipped what you promised, on time, on both platforms. In this industry, that alone deserves a ribbon.
- +The demo did its job: 86% Very Positive from 254 reviews is a genuinely strong signal, and it proves the core loop has enough pull to earn goodwill before launch. You built real anticipation from a standing start.
What It Botches
- -The tongue physics are a liar: the sticky-grapple mechanic is the load-bearing wall of this entire game, and early Steam reviews consistently flag it as inconsistent and janky. When your one signature mechanic misfires, every other fun thing you built collapses on top of it.
- -The demo-to-launch review slide is a red flag wearing a frog costume. Going from 86% Very Positive on the demo to 75% Mostly Positive at full launch means the full game introduced friction that the demo did not. That friction has a name: controls.
- -No PlayStation. No Switch. You are marketing a game explicitly built for chaotic group play, namedropping Lethal Company and R.E.P.O. in your own pitch, and you have locked out every PlayStation owner and every Nintendo household. Your 'friendslop' cannot reach half the friend group.
- -Twelve months of development time is a badge of honor until it is not. The jank in the controls and physics is almost certainly a direct consequence of shipping fast, and 'we built it in under a year' is a great press story right up until it becomes the excuse players use in negative reviews.
Think your work can survive this?
Drop a URL, screenshot, or file and Sally will give you the honest truth.
Who It's For
You are the ideal player if you have a Discord server with at least three chaotic friends, a tolerance for physics that occasionally lies to your face, and you have already put 40 hours into Lethal Company looking for something new to ruin your friendships with.
Who Should Skip
If you are a solo player, a PlayStation or Switch owner, or the type of person who left a negative review because a grapple hook missed by two pixels, Frog Sqwad will make you genuinely miserable and you should sit this one out.
Your turn. Drop something.
Drop a URL, screenshot, or file and Sally will give you the honest truth.