Insomniac's Fuse - can PlayStation's all-star topple Gears of War?

[Teajunkie]

"Gears of Ratchet & Clank" is probably how many will describe Fuse, Insomniac's first game for Xbox 360, and while that certainly tells us plenty, it reveals nothing of the exhilarating alchemy which happens where these inspirations connect.

At its simplest, Fuse is a co-op intensive cover-shooter with a taste for sizeable bodycounts and Bond Movie spectacle.
It deploys all the tricks and techniques you'd expect, a decade into the subgenre's operational life - cover-mounting, headshots, roady runs, KO revivals, blindfire and cornering - aided and abetted by a fancy, user-friendly proprietary engine which enables rapid iteration by artists and designers.


Glancing over the screenshots below, you may be hard-pressed to identify what makes this combination any more essential than, say, Gears of War: Judgment - also down for release in 2013, also sopping with polish.
That's where the Ratchet & Clank references come in.

Fuse offers a familiar array of shotguns, rifles, pistols and the like, but these purposefully generic firearms are no more than a fallback option. Insomniac's silver bullets are the four, upgradeable xenotech weapons - each invested with the titular "Fuse", a weird alien gloop which reacts with earthly matter to create highly eccentric implements of destruction.
Each Fuse gun is exclusive to one of the game's four mercenary leads (you can switch between them freely in single player) and the game's potential greatness rests on both their strengths and their weaknesses.
There's a full preview coming up in issue 91, but here's an introductory anecdote which should make a little of the aforesaid alchemy plain.



Fuse isn't the game Insomniac's E3 2011 trailer led us to expect - back then, the game was known as Overstrike, looked a tad more cartoonish and offered more in the way of non-lethal gadgets.
Studio boss Ted Price attributes this to the realisation that "story" and "gameplay" had too little in common, but we can't help but suspect that the original project was deemed too action-light for the Gears market.


Regardless, it's shaping up to be an accomplished iterative co-op shooter that might just achieve star quality, providing the xenotech arsenal is sufficiently deep and flexible. And you can read more about it in the very next issue of OXM, on sale 28th September.

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