Fuser review - fun creative toolbox, mediocre game
FUSER™ News — November 6, 2020
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Before Fuser, there was DropMix. Harmonix's first attempt at a music mixing game involved playing cards on a large electronic board, and it turned out to be too expensive and unwieldy to attract a large audience. But DropMix represented an idea Harmonix has held on to and tried to refine, resulting in Fuser, a game all about creating your own music using elements from different songs.
Fuser has a campaign mode, a freestyle mode, multiplayer freestyle, and multiplayer battles, so there's quite a lot to do. The campaign takes you across 36 levels on six different stages, which also sounds like a lot, until it turns out that for the most part the levels take the shape of one long tutorial. Fuser takes its time to introduce you to your DJ toolkit and the different ways it can be used, putting an emphasis on not overwhelming you.
This is how it works: your screen is made up of four turntables, and above them a list of songs. Before you can start mixing, you need to decide on your song selection by going into your virtual crate and picking individual songs. The standard version of Fuser comes with 100 songs, the VIP edition gives you an additional 25. Each song you can use is restricted to a certain snippet, likely that which works best overall and doesn't lead to dramatic changes in the time signature. If you want to change the beat, key, or pitch, you can do that manually, but that change will apply to all parts of your mix.
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