The latest game from the lads at Insmoniac has put a bit of a twist on the traditional warfare shooter
The biggest thing that we took away from our interview with Ted Price recently was that he wanted us to sit down and play this game before we made any judgement on it, and when you do finally switch it on and have a go at all the different modes, you get a really rich gaming experience.
Within the first level, you get your hands on the weapons that have given this game its title, all of which have been made with Fuse and have some pretty impressive powers. You can shatter opponents, use a giant shield to help out your team mates, use a bow and arrow that sets enemies on fire, and destroy them entirely using the Warp Rifle, which creates black holes and sends them off to…well we don’t know where.
The weapons are great, but the bad guys take a lot of killing with weapons that feel that they should be a whole lot more powerful. In particular, using Jacob as the sniper makes you use at least two head shots to take someone down, and you only get 12 shots from it. However, the damage does increase later in the game, as does your ability to carry more ammo, but we still feel like there should be more of an instant impact from these weapons, which is the major selling point of this game.
Fuse is essentially an alien substance, and when a shady company gets their hands on it, claiming they’re experimenting with renewable energy, they obviously make a load of weapons out of it.
All the characters fit into different categories of the archetypical video game figures, Dalton Brooks is the big muscle bound “tank”, Naya Deveraux who’s a master of stealth, Jacob Kimble is the ever-accurate sniper, and Isabelle Sinclair is a healer as well as a good flanker.
The story then revolves around that question, what happens if humans get their hands on a substance like this that we were never supposed to?
This is an interesting hook to hang all the action on, and that action is pretty good fun it has to be said. This game is aimed at gamers who want to play with others in teams, and the teamwork element is pretty important to the progression through the game. Even when we got a sneak preview of the game at our interview with Ted Price, he wanted to make sure that we experienced playing with at least one person, and jumped in for a game with us himself.
There is a feature called the LEAP feature, which allows players to switch between the characters as you’re playing, which comes in pretty handy depending on the situation. Given that all the characters are pretty different, it does help to have differing skills that you can call on, and it’s nice not to be pegged down to just one player, which gives the game an extra bit of longevity.
Overall, this is a decent game, and the leap function makes it great fun. The co-petetive mode, as it was termed by Ted Price, is an interesting twist on the usual, and something that we might see a whole lot more of with the increase in the social aspect of gaming on the next-gen consoles.
The Echelon mode allows you to take on waves and waves of enemies, similar to the Modern Warfare 3 style mode which we weren’t a big fan of. Bring back the juggernaut missions on the oil rig and the favelas we say. Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
Overall, given that the game underwent a shift in aesthetics early on in its life, it feels that it never really chose an identity to a certain extent. That said, is this game still good fun? Absolutely.
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