Fuse

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Third Person Cover Shooter; Sub-genre: Forced Co-op

ESRB: M (cartoony blood and profanity)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 12/8

Developer: Insomniac Games

Wiki page

I was hoping this would at least be a 2 out of 3 stars. And there are a lot of things that could have been done that could have made it such. Maybe it could have even been three stars. Sometimes the little things can make all the difference. This isn't a bad game, really. It just doesn't provide players with what we really want by missing too many notes. There are also BIG misses, too, so I'm not just dinging them purely from being nit-picky.

Calling your game "Fuse" is a pretty big mistake, too.

You almost called it "Overstrike." Who decided to change that? Can I have his/her job?

I can't really comment on the story other than to say it gets in the way. I know I've been singing the praises of The Last of Us and Mass Effect for having such immersive stories, but this is a co-op game. And, really, co-op games need as little story as possible. Video games present an interesting challenge to writers in that their time to explain and talk about things is generally very limited. The reason being is that it's a GAME. Ergo, every second a player spends not playing is frustrating. And this effect becomes heightened exponentially for every player added to the mix. Look at a game like Left 4 Dead as a good example: the story is pretty much explained just by the premise and setting while the ambient chatter of the characters is all you get for personality and motives. Now look at Fuse: uninteractive cutscenes that are awkwardly long and don't make a whole lot of sense; not at first glance (mine was "so... we're mercenaries or something?") and not in the story telling itself. When I beat the last boss with my co-op buddy, we both had no idea who he was, what his motives were, or what relation any of us had to him. He said something about bringing peace through terrifying nuclear war, but that's it. It's hard to pay attention, too, in a co-op situation. People crack jokes, walk around and get snacks... it's not the most suitable to immersive gaming.

Stopping to climb walls like Prince of Persia is also distracting.

I've said co-op a lot. If you haven't guessed, this is the type of game that gives you crappy AI controlled teammates that you're forced to have with you at all times if you don't have three other people to play with. You know, Insomniac, I commend you trying so hard to make co-op a thing again. But why alienate solo players? You decided to just leave yourself open to the inevitable complaints of how dumb the AI is. Why? You're only shooting yourself in the foot. Here are some ways you can make the non-player characters less annoying:

1. Make them invincible.

2. Give them unlimited ammo (already present?)

3. Make them care about the damn objectives; either making them able to do them or understand how to help the player do them.

4. Make them prioritize reviving the player above all else.

5. Make them understand the rules of the game, for crying out loud!

That number five one? One of the characters is a healer. I seriously got healed by her a total of one time during the campaign. Sure, we didn't figure out that we needed to spend her skill points for her for a while, but that still was a good several hours that she never did it when she could have. And why doesn't she just get some default skillset when I don't actively control her? Who would want to play a healer just to heal non-player characters?

I haven't even gotten to the actual gameplay yet. The enemies are too unvaried and don't have unique enough designs. Those that do have unique designs use robotics that feel out of place and unexplained (this may be due to the fact that the game got a redesign at some point during its development since it was originally called "Overstrike"). Boss characters have a stupid amount of health with little feedback on what is effective against them. I understand shooting their fuel tanks, but what about xeno-whatever guns and using their combo effects? And the characters all have virtually the same talent tree! Why have four completely different classes play so similar? And why is Dalton (the meathead) the ONLY one with a weapon fully committed to being his class (that being "shield guy")? I think Kimble as a sniper/chain lightning(?) guy is cool. But Izzy's assault rifle sucks. It's supposed to be for crowd control, but the stun takes so many hits to trigger that a lot of times you can simply just kill whoever you are trying to stun. And Naya can turn invisible. That is NOT helpful in a game so oriented around teamwork. What's funny is that the same ability is incredibly useful in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer. But that's because there are objectives that it can be used to achieve while the group survives and kites bad guys. 

This all lends the game the feel of being an overlong demo. There are clearly some ideas at play, but the good ones are few before more half-hearted ones take place for everything else.

Look how buff Dalton is. This in no way affects his abilities compared to the others!

There is a single multiplayer game mode aside from the main campaign: Echelon. A strange name for what we all know as "horde mode." Funny enough, this is all I really could want from a game like this. The execution doesn't offer as much content as Mass Effect 3's, but the little improvements this game does have give it some strength. ME3's multiplayer is an entirely slapped together affair. And its clunky controls really drag it down. So one big strength for Fuse is that it looks and feels a lot cleaner. The buttons are much better (a dedicated cover button!) and the animations are smoother; characters can enter cover from any direction easier and don't have crappy hiccups like having their reload animations reset while sliding to a wall. But Fuse has the opposite problem: boring enemy design, less classes with less depth, less maps (all borrowed from single player, too), and spawning and objectives are a little bit sloppier (I've had a weapon crate spawn so far away with so many enemies on it that there was no way to even touch it before it was destroyed!).

More confounding is the matchmaking system. The game REQUIRES there be one player for each character. So if you really want to play as, say, Dalton? Hope you're willing to wait longer to find a game where a Dalton spot is open. It's also strange that a failed map will reload with the same four people, but a successful map will kick all four people separately back to the matchmaker. That's backwards! I don't want to keep playing with losers, I want to keep playing with winners!

Playing games with people who aren't stoned or drunk is actually really damn fun, believe it or not!

Conclusion:

If you're really hungry for a co-op game, you will enjoy this purely for being a co-op game. Don't plan on playing split-screen, though, since the screen is split the wrong way: vertically!

Additional notes on split-screen:

In my experience with XBox live, the "guest" player's progress never gets saved. So I used a second account for the second player. Only one of the two accounts is a "gold" account, so that meant we had to play in offline mode; we were stuck with computer controlled teammates. Cold dog!