Fuse Review

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Fuse is, in a word, generic. The game has little to offer that other games in the genre do not already have. Furthermore, Fuse is extremely weak in areas that its competitors excel in. This generation, the third person genre has been littered with some truly great titles such as Mass Effect and The Last of Us. While Fuse is a decent game, it pales in comparison to the stuff we already have.

Honestly, you have played a thousand games that are almost exactly the game. Fuse is a third person shooter that attempts to throw in some twists featuring weapons with unique powers. One of these powers summons a shield and another summons a black hole around an enemy if enough bullets have been fired. While this is all functional, it is far from unique.

The team-mates in this game are pretty poor as well. There was one moment fairly early on when they were supposed to protect me from enemy fire to transport a bomb. Well, I wound up killing most of the enemies myself and almost detonated the bomb. The game also requires two players to press certain buttons to get past certain checkpoints. While this is fine in Co-op I suppose, in single player it quickly becomes a hassle. The enemies in this game are pretty generic and will get boring fast. Many of them have far too much health and look to be pretty much the same. There is the occasional giant robot to increase variety, but it does little to add to the appeal. The gameplay as a whole just lacks the engagement of other third person shooters.

Presentation

One could argue that Fuse has good graphics. While this is true, the environments as a whole are quite bland. The art style also gets a bit rough. The weapons often release this dark aura that conflicts with the lighter visual style of the rest of the game. The guns look like your stereotypical firearms you would find in any third person shooter these days. Don’t get me wrong, the game looks nice. The graphics and visuals are all well done, it just isn’t anything special. The thing is, visuals are probably the strongest aspect of Fuse. If all I can is that it is good but nothing new, where does that leave the game as a whole?

The voice acting is okay, but pretty generic. There is nothing in neither the visuals nor the audio that will really grab your attention and make you want to keep playing.

Story/Creativity

The game falls short in the creativity department. Specifically, there were several moments in the game where I felt like I was playing Mass Effect 3. The costumes are remarkably similar and the guns make familiar sounds. I am not calling Fuse a direct ripoff or anything of the kind, but there are some definite similarities. There is little that makes Fuse standout as a whole. The alien tech weapons would be a neat idea, but it has been done too many times by infinitely superior games.

The story is pretty generic. The CIA has a special strike team to take on a private military corporation. The leader of the group is a gruff guy with plenty of military experience. The other members of the team all have their own respective backgrounds in turning people into a bloody pulp. The problem is they are all like that. I often found that there was little that defined the characters aside from their respective methods of committing mass murder. There is also the matter of the plot itself which offers nothing substantial or memorable. The story offered little to me besides a very crude way of stringing everything together.

Life span

Fuse falls short in the longevity department, but not entirely due to the length of the actual game. Fuse’s far more serious flaw is that it fails to maintain a consistent level of engagement. During the time I played Fuse, I was often tempted to play another game I had on hand. The point here is that Fuse is not a game that makes you come back for more. In an industry where games like Skyrim and Mass Effect offer over twenty hours of gameplay and still have fans wanting more, this is simply unacceptable.