Fuse Review

Insomniac Games is trying something spectacular and new for itself, but is its original shooter really all that original?
The best things in life are better with friends, but those experiences are rarely bad by yourself. Fuse wants so badly for players to have a co-op group of four that it punishes them for trying to enjoy it alone. This is one of many crises Insomniac Games’ uncertain third-person shooter faces throughout its eight-hour campaign, which features so many ups and downs it’s difficult to discern where its greatness begins and mistakes end.

In tone and depth of story, Fuse is essentially a playable summer blockbuster movie. For four-player co-op shooting purposes, that's a good thing: its a decent way to use these four sci-fi guns to make a mess of an army of bad dudes, including a wacky Russian psychic and a pile of murderous robots. In tandem with the distinct character skills – a resuscitative med-grenade, deployable cover, etc. – each member of the heroes-for-hire team Overstrike 9 becomes someone I enjoy playing as.

Each of them brings heavy backstory baggage to the battlefield, but while their dark pasts define their violent efficiency, they clash with their uplifting sense of humor. In the blink of an eye, expect Fuse’s cast to careen from witty one-liners and jovial jokes to gouging men’s eyes out, painting entire rooms with enemy blood, and generally murdering in morbid fashion. It’s a jarring and confusing tonal imbalance – perhaps commiserating about dating problems is how this team copes with nuking an enemy-occupied island, but Fuse spends so little time exploring or developing its main characters that it’s hard to buy into them or their ambiguous motivations.

Clarity of purpose as a whole is a big problem, because Fuse doesn’t feel the need to let you know much at all about its story. For example, Fuse, an alien substance that melds with human technology to create impressively destructive weapons, seems to be a known quantity in this universe. Insomniac only bothers to give the basics of its origins in a pop-up menu. From there, the story devolves into killing everything until the evil terrorists can’t terrorize anymore. Oh, and those aliens? They’re never seen, heard from, or spoken of – so why do they exist in this story at all?

At least the guns are cool, regardless of their confusing origins. Each has a tactical purpose tailored to different play styles, and when a coordinated co-op team uses them together, Fuse’s standard stop-and-pop cover shooting graduates to a boisterous bit of strategic action. Dalton’s protective Magshield is a great piece of mobile cover for his teammates, and also acts as a shotgun with a barrel the size of a barn door. (Tactical players should love looking out for their friends with him.) Cloaking as Naya lets her get the drop on enemies before using the Warp Rifle to transform men into explosive black holes. (She's a terrific mix of quiet and loud, and succeeds at both.) Izzy can crystalize enemies with her Fuse bullets, freezing them in place (the least climactic skill in Overstrike 9's arsenal). Jacob’s delightful crossbow creates remote mines out of magma bolts, allowing him to melt his enemies individually or in groups. (It is, hands down, my favorite gun of the lot, because it makes Jacob the most effective combatant of 'em all).

Weapons are where Fuse really comes into its own – blowing up burning groups, unloading on a sniper from behind a shield, and ganging up on crystallized robots is a lot of fun when you’re laughing alongside the annihilating force that is your Overstrike 9.

Without three other human players to back you up, though, Fuse falls apart completely. The inept A.I.-controlled teammates don’t begin to behave according to their badass character traits, instead opting to group up in the same piece of cover far away from the fight. Dalton, hilariously, doesn’t recognize that his Magshield is a protective device -- instead, he treats it like a long-range rifle, popping out of cover and aiming ineffectively at distant foes.

And it gets worse: bizarrely, you can’t switch to another character while down, despite being able to body-swap during combat. This is particularly painful because your A.I. buddies tend to run into walls or ignore your cries of pain when you’re dying on the floor waiting for revival. In nearly every instance I fell to enemy fire, my team was wiped.

Separate from the campaign, you can return to single-player locations in the sterile survival mode, Echelon. These spaces are slightly tweaked, sometimes with a turret or two, but otherwise don’t do much to account for the large waves of enemies during attack and defend objectives. While certain story scenarios allow you to apply tactical thought ahead of your attack, Echelon is reactive and relatively mindless in comparison -- hold out here, attack there, protect that, repeat for 30 minutes until complete. Echelon isn’t actively bad, but it’s barely worth it unless you are, for whatever reason, absolutely desperate for more Fuse after eight hours of better campaign missions.