Fuser - Review

For a while there you couldn't go into a video game store without seeing some form of music game and one of the developers behind the biggest game Guitar Hero was Harmonix. They broke away from it to do their own thing with Rock Band and Guitar Hero got a spin-off in DJ hero and then both the Hero series quickly vanished, but now Harmonix are back with their own take on the DJ game, the question is does this offer a phat beat or are these mixes lame?

Fuser does offer a career path which does make for a fun way to experience the game, but it's not all that inventive as far as a career in the music industry might go. At the start you get introduced to how it all works and your first manager will walk you through a lot of the tricks and tools that you need to make music. As you clear each of the sets, you will be given a later slot in the schedule with the last show of the night being the headline act, that works fine, but it happens over and over again. As you move through the world of DJ’ing you meet more people and play more sets but by the end of the second location I didn't really want to have some random person telling me about a new feature or you know the crowd thinks not sick or whatever they were saying; I just wanted to make music.

The dilemma is you really need to do the career mode in order to unlock content the content is not locked behind any sort of restrictive wall except for the coins. As you complete sets and depending on the level of which you complete them at you will earn coins song coins and style coins, and like the names suggest one allows you to purchase new tracks for your crate and the other new gear to define your own DJ look. Picking up coins is relatively easy but when you consider that there are dozens upon dozens of songs locked away that you can't get to unless you have the coins means you have to go and keep working at getting the best scores on the sets to try and get more coins. None of this would be an issue, if it weren’t for the crowd metre and this system alone is annoying and that is the nice way to put it, it's not a bad idea it's just not a greatly executed one.

When it comes to making music you have your selection of songs that you can curate before a set, once you're in there you can lay down drum, bass, guitar, and vocals, pretty basic stuff. The more you mix the bigger your song range will become there is nothing stopping you from putting down two vocals or two drums, it's really up to you how you want to do that. The big thing is that you need to drop the track to the beat, you don't wanna do it offbeat because it will ruin your music and it also makes the crowd turn against you so timing becomes very important. Timing is also required when you are ejecting a disc, or muting a disc, or syncing up multiple discs to drop at once, you need to ensure that you have your timing down, if you stand any chance of being a successful DJ. In each set you will be given a constantly evolving list of things to do, your manager might ask you to play the vocals from Lady Gaga or the baseline from ‘Satisfaction’, and you have a finite amount of time in order to apply those requests, do well and you will earn a bigger score, which can help you earn more coins.

The frustration comes in because the members of the audience will tweet in their choices for something, this won't be hard, but while you're trying to deal with the requirement of only having two discs from the 80s from the manager. You then have to start dealing with somebody who wants to have Shania Twain's voice or a song from the 2010s and if you miss them the audience begins to hate you basically. While all this is happening you also need to make sure you're playing a good mix if you sit on something too long the audience will turn against you and that crowd metre goes down, so you forever trying to juggle requests from two different sources, constantly evolving your mix and ensuring that what you're doing, is done in time so you don't make bad music. None of this is even touched on the fact that you can alter the tempo of the tracks, so you can take the lyrics from ‘Bad Guy’ and have them play so slowly that it's almost an entirely different song.

If you step away from career mode and go into freestyle you can just make music, you still have to worry about the beats, making sure you're dropping tracks on in rhythm, but there is no crowd to worry about there is no manager, it's just you making music. This is where I had the most fun once I had unlocked a good portion of songs, which thankfully is entirely up to you, what you unlock, as you can spend your coins how you want; I was able to just make music and when Fuser is getting out of its own way you can make some great music. The game also offers the ability to battle against folks you know DJ versus DJ sadly though because I played before the game was officially released this was not something I could test all that well.

Taking a look at how everything comes together for visuals and audio it really needs to be talked about separately, the games music and audio cues are fantastic but given that this is Harmonix, that makes perfect sense, as they are masters at music games. Playing the game on Switch everything that you would consider a HUD element or the deck, was perfect it looked great, your DJ the people standing on the stage and the locations themselves not so much. Whenever the camera would pan around the character model of the DJ and the set became blurry and pixelated, there were even times when my DJ would attempted bust a move but the animation would lag, which was really odd to see. There is a massive range of stylistic choices you can make and they do all appear really nicely in the menus but again once they are put in motion on the DJ avatar they look meh at best.

Again the flip side of all this is the music, you can put in all the four parts from Rage Against the machine and just listen to the song, slow down the tempo make it a bit more of a normal pace song from them and then maybe throw in the lyrics from ‘Never Going to Give You Up’ by Rick Astley. The only time it really became weird in a musical sense was when the game would have songs played at a slower BPM by default going into an event, not being able to say, hey I'm doing an 80s themed show I want faster BPM was a little weird, you can modify that once you're playing but it just throws it off when it's not that way to begin with.

Fuser is a game that is highly recommendable to anyone who likes music, the problem that the game has is that it doesn't let you just enjoy the music. In order to unlock the full suite of songs you have to earn coins to buy them in game, which is a great idea, the problem is that every time you enter a new set, you have so many different mechanics to try and balance that failing a set is going to be your first thing until you really get in the groove. The simple fact is that Fuser has great potential but there's just maybe a few too many scratches on this disc to let the music play right.

The Score

7.0

Review code provided by NCSoft

The Pros

+A really varied music selection to accommodate most players

+When you can just make music, it takes very little effort for great results

The Cons

-The career mode is a must but is full of so many things to manage, it loses the fun

-Visually, at least on Switch, it is not great