Insomiac's first outing with EA is FUSE. What the heck is it? Does it play any better than the Resistance titles it was responsible for?
Well, first you gotta understand that this is a third person shooter (TPS). It moves more slowly than a FPS and yes, you will swing the view around uncontrollably if you suffered from Tourette Syndrome but that's another matter. And this is the first consideration you should make when taking up a TPS rather than a FTS.
I am not a big fan of TPS, though the extra animated sequences make it look more fun when you butcher your enemies but besides this, it doesn't quite have the chops to deliver the intensity of action found on a FPS.
So how does FUSE measure up in this? It's not bad but not terribly good. For one, there are so many shades of borrowed ideas you'd find here. The four player action is nice, the skill tree is similar to the one found on Borderlands 2, and the storyline sounds like an action B-grade movie from the 1980s.
Working up a Sweat
If you own a treadmill or been to the Gym working out, you'd know how tiring it becomes when you only work on one machine at a time.That said, the Campaign gameplay in FUSE is not much of a work out if you compared it to the other shooters. Everything is there for you and yes, it doesn't take long to figure out what to do and where to do it. This is nice if you are a brain dead zombie and not very challenging if all you ever had to do was to kill everyone in sight and put out a fire.
But the levels are not in the park variety either. As a four player mission, your job is to ensure everyone makes it thru all the levels intact and if one of your team mates got killed, you have to restart. This means that every time a player is in bleeding out mode, you cannot trust the other character AI to rescue his or her ass. It would have been much easier if there was only two or one character on screen at any one time instead of four but the power that be decided that the story was best told from a four player perspective.
You can of course choose any of the four characters to play even mid way during a campaign. That flexibility is a plus but not the weaponry.
Have you Seen my Ammo Pouch?
You weapon choices are limited. Machine pistol, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, pistol and semi-auto sub machine gun. The unique choices are meant for different characters, and this range from a Fuse action crossbow to some whacked out shield gun. Ammo is limited on all weapons. Run out of bullets on one, you'd be asked to switch weapons. Bummer. And ammo pouches are only found after you have killed an enemy, which is also limited to prevent you from being too trigger happy.
I would have preferred an option to carry any three weapons instead of being fixated on just three categories, one super weapon, one secondary weapon and a side arm. You can't switch your sidearm for a shotgun, which can only be swapped out with a secondary weapon type only.
Each badass has an armour meter. So it takes more shots to kill one if you used an inferior weapon. I found that a well placed shot in the head normally does the trick but that's hard to do with sub machine guns. For this, the pistol does its job best since you have more ammo for that. If you don't like the humble pistolero....well too bad. This self defeatist policy on weapons is probably the biggest flaw in the game so go figure. The game has two options of play, Campaign and Echelon, the latter being a Horde mode. This is where you will get strut your stuff after completing your campaign and though is fun, it has to be said that it is way better if you had four online players on screen.
Conclusion
I didn't like the two player co-op view. Instead of using a landscape view it gives you a tight portrait view—which makes shooting more difficult. When enemy fire hits you, the first thing to do is to hit them back but you have to swing around a lot more just to see where it is coming from due to the restricted view.
The limited weapon choices is probably the biggest downside for the game and the only redeeming feature here is the horde mode, which gives it more playability in the long run if you are saddle with a partner at home or online.
Beyond this, I can't really say it has the chops to be that one game you'd play on your own, over and over again.
FUSE on PS3
rating
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