Fuse Review: Insomniac Abandons its Personality

When you boot up an Insomniac game for the first time, what are you looking to get out of it? For me, and for, I would assume, most long-time fans of the developer, the key, first and foremost, is cool, weird weapons. A decent story is also a high priority, but the weapons come first. Inventive tools for dealing death are what elevated the Ratchet & Clank franchise above other similar titles in the PS2 era, and the Resistance series is memorable mostly because of the strange guns that the chimera use. 

Fuse immediately fails to meet the Insomniac standard precisely because most of what passes for weird weapons in this game aren't really all that interesting, There's a gun that crystalizes enemies, and while it looks cool when you do that, it's not a very functionally compelling mechanic, because after you crystalize your foes you'll shoot them a couple more times to shatter them

There's a gun that creates singularities, but you have to hit an enemy so many times to create the singularity that this rifle really isn't particularly more effective than using any regular assault weapon. Maybe the guy you're shooting will be close enough to another guy that they're both sucked into the black hole, but that doesn't happen a lot.

There's a crossbow that shoots flaming energy bolts. Cool.

The one actually cool weapon is a pistol-looking thing that projects a shield when you aim it, and when you fire it sends out a wave of energy that hits all foes within a few meters in front of you. I like this one, because using it allows you to play this game differently than you would any other generic shooter.

But for the most part, Fuse is very much a generic cover-based shooter, and I feel that co-op actually damages the experience. See, while there are four weird weapons in the game – along with the standard shooter arsenal and a couple heavy weapons – each of these “exotech” firearms is assigned to a particular character.

The nature of the campaign in Fuse is that a strike team or four people carry out missions against an evil corporation called Raven which is creating weapons of mass destruction from a substance called Fuse. Whether you're playing alone or with friends, all four of these characters are always present. In solo play, this is fine, because you can switch between characters on the fly if you don't like your special gun. But if you have a full four-player co-op game going, you can only switch characters from the lobby, and whoever gets stuck with the stupid crossbow is gonna be pretty mad.

I played splitscreen with a friend for a few hours on normal difficulty, and that was incredibly exhausting. I had to take a nap after she left.

But my complaints about the weapons might be offset if the physical act of playing Fuse were enjoyable, but it's so much of a grind that it's kind of a pain to get through. I played splitscreen with a friend for a few hours on normal difficulty, and that was incredibly exhausting. I had to take a nap after she left. The problem is that Fuse is one of those games where you have to unload 40 or 50 shots from an assault rifle to take down a normal enemy, and there are lots of those in any given fight. Battles tend to feel pretty drawn out, but you have no idea what “drawn out” means until the game throws a big robot at you. The “weak” robot enemies will take a few thousand bullets before going down, but stronger types take a lot more than that. 

Now, these battles are not always particularly difficult, because as you would expect when you get shot too much you go down but don't immediately die, and your squadmates can help you back up. So when we were playing there were not many occasions in which we got a “game over” screen. Even so, there's only so much dive rolling around a small arena that I'm willing to do before I get mad, and Fuse took me far past that threshold. Even worse is that during these boss-style fights, the special exotech weapons are functionally reduced to being no more effective than any other gun.

If there is anything nice I have to say about Fuse, it's that Insomniac hired some quality voice talent. Brian Bloom, Jennifer Hale, Ali Hillis and Khary Payton make up the core team, and other awesome talent like Steve Blum and Gwendoline Yeo pop up as well. Unfortunately, they are working in service of a story that is too involved for its own good. 

From the very beginning, it's feels as if you're missing some context for what's going on, and that's because Insomniac created unfamiliar concepts without really setting them up beforehand. This is becoming a pretty common theme in games, but the story is complex enough in Fuse that the problem was less emotional involvement like in Tomb Raider or Far Cry 3 and more about not really grasping what is going on early in the game. The storytelling is all so very clumsy, but this is what happens when you strap a story on a game structure instead of writing it properly.

Technically speaking, Fuse is solid, and when I turned the difficulty down to easy about halfway through the game some of the pain of the grind went away. But boss fights never stopped being annoying. And if for some reason you enjoy the combat of Fuse so much you're interested in context-free combat scenarios, Echelon mode – which is a sort of objective-based horde mode – is for you. But I don't really see the point of it.

Coming from a studio like Insomniac which has always shown imagination in their game mechanics, that Fuse is so painfully generic is quite disappointing. Fuse, ultimately, is an effort best forgotten, because it demonstrates little of what made us like Insomniac in the first place. 

Final Verdict

Fuse: Five out of Ten

 

For the purpose of this review, the publisher provided us with a physical Xbox 360 copy of Fuse.