Fuse

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This review is for the campaign, and I will be the first to admit, this is a DNF (Did Not Finish) for me. I just couldn't bring myself to complete this game. It felt like work. It just wasn't fun, and I felt like I was punishing myself to continue playing it just for the sake of completing it. So why am I reviewing this game, if I didn't finish it? To hopefully spare you from blowing your hard earned $60 on it. Fans of Insomniac should steer clear of this one and wait for the next "Ratchet" or "Resistance".

As the title states, "Fuse" does not feel like a game by Insomniac, which is one of my favorite developers of all time (I'm a huge fan of "Ratchet", "Resistance", and "Spyro"). It does cover-based stop and pop gunplay, climbing/platforming, and "witty" dialogue... just like "Uncharted" and countless other games. But unlike "Uncharted", everything just feels "off" in "Fuse", and slogging through its mundane, military campaign was generally painful.

Prior to this game's release, if you were to have told me that Insomniac was going to release a title that wasn't fun to play and that didn't have a good story, I would not have believed you. "Fuse" has made me a believera believer that even Insomniac can drop the ball. This should be a warning to all developers that if you're going to try to duplicate the success of "Uncharted" and "Gears", you had better get your formula to a level where it can stand side by side with those games. This game feels like it was developed by some fly-by-night rookie developer on a shoestring budget, with a plot cooked up by teenage boys.

Everyone is allowed to make mistakes, including heavyweights like Insomniac. I still root for them every day, and I just hope that this kind of tough guy nonsense is not the the new direction of the developer that brought us the wonderful universes of Spyro, Ratchet, and Nathan Hale.

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Looks great, plays great, too short. I feel cheated, and I'm not waiting around for DLC to make it longer.

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Bought it to play co-op with a friend. We got exactly what we expected, which is okay. Game was really short though. If anything that is my main gripe. The main idea of buying upgrades doesn't really work as well as you'd think, since it's all the same stuff across characters. The gameplay didn't do anything new or exciting, except that each character had a special-mechanic gun.

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Fuse provides an interesting mix of good and bad. It is clearly Insomniac making use of a lot of the code from the Resistance series:

Things that crawl on the ground and then jump at you (Leapers) check

Occasional super-armored enemies with a weak spot on their back (Stalkers) check

Unstable, explosive orbs stacked in threes that you can shoot and cause explosions (Power Orbs) check

Other-world-tech powered weapons check

Enemies that expand on the definition of 'bullet sponge' check

Enemies behind mounted turrets that seem to hit you the second you stick your foot in the open check

Power cores that you have to shoot out to take something down (like at the end of Resistance) check

Enemies that can turn nearly invisible check

As a single person game this ranks as pretty good. The aiming seems a little awkward. It's annoying that no matter what is happening your character runs at one speed when you're controlling them. Regardless of how much urgency you feel to get to cover, your character can't be made to respond accordingly. Your other 3 companions (who you can switch to at any time) are sometimes decent in helping to take out the swarms of enemies, and other times they are strangely incapable of hitting enemies right out in the open. This is especially annoying when you flank the soldiers with riot shields so that the other 3 characters have a free shot at them and somehow none of the soldiers are taken out.

The campaign is enjoyable in terms of giving you plenty of targets to shoot at, but having to sink 15-25 shots in common soldiers gets old pretty quick. It's amazing that all this cool Fuse-enhanced weaponry can't do more damage. The weapons have some neat effects--Izzy's gun can encase enemies in melanite (a crystal-like substance) giving you the chance to shatter them into pieces before they get out, but you still have to hit an enemy with at least a dozen shots to encase them. Dalton's shield protects you from most weapons and can reflect damage back on enemies--but they have to be relatively close for that damage to be enacted. Jacob's crossbow has the most immediate effect on target--often just 2 shots will take down most soldiers. Alternatively, you can fire a couple of shots into an area (hitting either enemies or nearby walls, where they 'stick') and then detonate them causing some fiery deaths--but the crossbow doesn't hold that many rounds so you'll spend as much time looking for ammo in the middle of a fight as you will actually fighting. Naya's gun can cause enemies to implode into a black hole/singularity--this is by far my favorite weapon in the game. The nice thing is that you can tag multiple enemies with several shots and then finish one enemy off and the implosion will often chain to the other tagged enemies. The downside is that, like Izzy's melanite gun, you'll have to hit a target at least a dozen times in order to get this effect.

This bullet-sponge tendency for enemies (which started with Resistance and seems to be something Insomniac keeps making worse) is extremely annoying. All this new-space-tech-infused weaponry and it can't take out a riot shield? A common foot soldier takes a dozen or more rounds to take down--that's a little difficult to believe. Izzy's gun, it should be noted, is actually effective against riot shields--again you have to sink 15-20 shots into the riot shield to get it to work, but it does work. It's even worse when you switch to the normal weapons like the Savager or Daybreaker, which are essentially rifles with normal bullets, where you'll routinely have to sink about 20 shots into a soldier to kill him. I would much rather have twice the number of enemies then to have fewer enemies that I'm pelting with an absurd amount of ammo to take down.

As a multi-player game it works a little better as your co-players can perform with more intelligence than the AI that the other 3 characters have when you're on single-player mode. If everyone effectively learns the strengths of their characters it can be a fun time efficiently dispatching enemies.

Of course there are some crazy annoyances, whether single or multi-player--the Leadfoot and Leadfire (and a few other enemies) that are encased in armor that seems resistant to everything have to be taken down by hitting the tank on their back. Just like the Stalkers in Resistance, it's not just hitting the weak spot on the back that's the challenge, it's having to hit it several dozen times. More bullet-sponge, more annoyance. The Enforcer is another overly-armored enemy, but its weak spot is in the front, but only exposed when it performs certain actions. This creates another opportunity to frustratingly blow through a great deal of ammo to get very little result. You can take down an Enforcer by continually hitting them even when the weak spot is not exposed, but you're chewing up a ridiculous amount of ammo this way.

As you advance your characters their weapons gain new abilities--Naya can turn invisible, Izzy can throw med-beacons that heal you when you're down, but gaining XP to do this is a little slow. Much worse is gaining 'Fuse Credits' to apply towards team perks. Team perks are things like Faster revive time for fallen teammates, increased health, gain XP or Fuse Credits faster, do more damage to Fuse shields, etc. Each character can have 1 active team perk at any given time. In campaign mode, however, Fuse Credits can not be acquired quickly enough to make these relevant. You can always go back and play the first level over and over again, it's the easiest to get through and has a decent amount of Fuse Credits to be had with the smallest effort--but that gets old.

You can always play in 'Echelon' mode, which is basically a horde mode where huge waves of enemies come at you. XP and Fuse Credits can be earned at a faster pace in this mode. This is something that's more worth doing as a team because the volume of enemies easily overwhelms the AI of the other 3 characters and you're bailing them out quite a bit if you're on your own.

Overall, this isn't the worst game out there. It's enjoyable in the way a summer action movie is, fun, but nothing you're expecting to see nominated for film of the year. The environments are decent, nothing especially awe-inspiring (unlike many of the scenes in Resistance 2, which were just incredible), but they are littered with plenty of ammo to re-stock your weapons, and plenty of cover to take on the enemies. The ending of the game certainly sets up the likelihood of Fuse 2, in which I'm sure Insomniac will make enemies who never die no matter how much you shoot them, because that's really the only place they have left to go.

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I spend the bulk of my gaming time playing co-op with friends. When we played Ghost Recon Future Soldier (fffffuuuuuu, 30K), we got away with playing just three of us. I highly recommend you play with the max 4 man squad for this game. Even on normal difficulty there were times when we were really challenged.

The game itself is a lot of fun, and I definitely recommend it. The skill tree for each class is pretty linear, but getting team perks adds to that dynamic.

Both the main story line and the optional fight-wave-after-wave-of-enemies was a lot of fun, and the latter provides you with cash to unlock the team perks.

To sum up, great game but I would not want to play with the AI controlled squad mates