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[FUSE] Insomniac's 4-player shooter. It is OUT and so are the reviews.

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Posts

  • LaPuzzaLaPuzza Registered User regular
    urahonky wrote: »
    This sounds like the perfect Gamefly game.

    Not a bad call. The game's better than the demo shows off, so a rental would let you know if you think like the people that are giving it 8.5s or the people that are giving it 6.5s.

    Anyone giving this a 9 or better, or a 6 or worse, is just being a goose. It's above average, but not lifechanging. I feel about it the way I felt about Borderlands 1 in a lot of ways. It does some stuff wrong, but gets the core game right, and it shines when player 2 presses start.

  • shoeboxjeddyshoeboxjeddy Registered User regular
    Feeling sad about how this turned out, my group ordered cheap cheap copies of Syndicate instead. Hopefully a good choice...

  • LaPuzzaLaPuzza Registered User regular

    I'm nearly finished with this, and I'm still having a pretty good time, even solo. I've got rose-tinted glasses on for it - the tribute to my buddy Michael Kuehl in the game is quite nice, so I'm all in for Insomniac. So, for example, I'm finding the ridiculous plot b-movie endearing instead of dumb. But, honestly, when the baddie steals a super secret substance on Monday and has space nukes full of the stuff on Wednesday, all you can do is laugh.

    The more I play, the better I like the AI. It works better than GoW in my experience, actually. They can be nudged through your actions (no squad commands) to flank and surround enemies, and they handle firefights well enough. The biggest issue, however, is that the 4 different weapons create great opportunities that the AI can’t capitalize on.

    For example: room full of baddies with snipers up above. What the AI does on its own is hunker down and defend against the advancing horde. That works fine, and you get the job done.

    What I want it to do is drop a stationary mag shield for the crossbow guy to hide behind to take out snipers, and he chain-burns the sniper crew. Meanwhile, Dalton and crystal gun gal advance behind Dalton’s shield gun, pushing back the advance to protect the counter sniper from assault. Then you get Ms. Invisible up to either flank or to stealth/melee the more annoying spec ops guys that may come out.

    I can basically do 1 or 2 of those things jumping between guys, but it would be SO MUCH COOLER to have the AI do all of that. However, if the AI could do that, honestly, it wouldn’t need me to help out, and I could just hide until the battle was over with any one of the 4.

    I guess, in the end, the AI can clear the bar set for generic-cover-shooter quite easily, but doesn’t quite rise to the level Insomniac teases in the best engagements.

  • SyphonBlueSyphonBlue The studying beaver That beaver sure loves studying!Registered User regular
    Feeling sad about how this turned out, my group ordered cheap cheap copies of Syndicate instead. Hopefully a good choice...

    Syndicate is great, that is a fantastic choice.

    LxX6eco.jpg
    PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
  • LaPuzzaLaPuzza Registered User regular
    I beat this last night. First thing in the credits was a picture of my buddy, and yesterday was his birthday. That was nice.

    Final conclusion: good game. What I actually was thinking about the 10th time I died against the final boss was that it was a fair game. Every single time I died in the whole game, I deserved it. I wasn’t fighting the controls or cursing at the mechanics. At its core, it does everything a good game should. It just doesn’t do much more than that.

    What did surprise me is that you end the game with so little of the currency needed to buy unlockables. There’s no great way to farm cash, and you don’t get Fuse Bucks from playing the campaign normally. It’s all pickups. You can complete the whole game and have $0 when you’re done.

    What that did was push me back into echelon (horde) mode. I didn’t realize how much more powerful I’d become through the campaign until I went back to echelon mode and started wrecking mini bosses.

  • LaPuzzaLaPuzza Registered User regular
    I FINALLY got the chance to play this in co-op over Xbox live last night. It elevates the game a great deal.

    I jumped in with a buddy that was about an hour from beating the game. This was the point where the game actually got a bit difficult at parts because of the variety of enemies that are thrown at you. 2 player, it was suddenly a lot better. Flanking is a big deal in this game, moreso than GoW, but going out on your own 1 player means if you go down, you’re gonna stay down. Here, if your buddy knows you’re going to get up on that elevated platform on the left, he can save you when you need it. That really opens up a lot more freedom than you have without backup.

    Also, the weapon combos are much, much more common and natural in 2 player. When he saw I was spraying a group of enemies to pop open a chain of black holes, he tossed in a couple of bolts from the crossbow and lit them up with the secondary fire. The result was a much bigger explosion, more dead dudes at the choke point, and huge EXP bonuses for us. We were leveling up much faster than solo, just for that reason.

    Speaking of leveling up, it looks like you get “your” version of whichever character you jump into. So I had my fully loaded Jacob for Fusion, but my friend had the version that was speced out for regular weapons. I don’t know why I thought that he’d be playing my guys, or I’d be playing his, but it was much better this way. You don’t have to care what level your teammate is with which guy, because they all work right for you.

    We decided to “try” Echelon mode, and that went for 2 hours until about 1:30 AM, just playing one level over and over, and we never did better than 2 stars. That’s the best way to get Fuse Credits for unlocks, etc., but it’s just a really fun way to keep playing with the characters. The Echelon levels are really well thought out, too, so it doesn’t ever feel like you can, or have to, take the cheap way out. Here I did find that we were both too aggressive at points, and needed to remember that someone ought to be looking at the thing we were supposed to defend. I also was surprised to see that, even if you go down and don’t get revived in Echelon mode, you pop back up if the rest of your team completes the stage/wave.

    We talked a bit about the 10 hour length of the campaign. It’s not terribly long in hours, but considering that 90% of that is spent in action – there isn’t much downtime – it feels long enough.

    Does anyone here have this game on Xbox 360? Besides just screwing around, I’m big on the idea of actually getting 4 people playing together. I think 4 players could make the higher difficulty levels a ton of fun.

  • Skull2185Skull2185 Registered User regular
    As soon as GameFly ships this to me, I'll have it on Xbox. Availability is low I guess, so it's taking a while... They recieved the game I sent back on Monday, usually get the game in my Q sent out that same day =/

    Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
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