The Harmonix team opened up their remote press preview for FUSER throwing a surprising amount of shade at the rhythm game genre. Despite countless innovations, there's one unshakeable truth at the heart of nearly every rhythm game: there's very little room for creativity.
A perfect score in a given Rock Band or Guitar Hero song will always sound the same no matter who plays it. There isn't really space for what makes music special. Scoring is prescriptive and there isn't much room for true self-expression.
I can't speak for anyone else who was on the Discord call for the preview, but it was amazing to hear the rhythm game genre's most recognizable company lay out, in very plain terms, one of the greatest failures of the genre, which extended to the majority of games created by Harmonix themselves.
It was even more amazing to hear them say that with FUSER, they think they have solved the problem.
So far, it seems they weren't lying.
FUSER hands-on preview: a music festival at home
Self-expression is built into every aspect of FUSER.
At first glance, FUSER looks similar to Harmonix's cult hit Dropmix, a board game/card game hybrid that challenged players to create wild mashups by mixing and matching different parts of different songs.
The basic gameplay of FUSER is the same. The game features more than 100 songs, and each of them has been divided into different tracks for drums, bass instruments, lead instruments, and vocals. The game uses some seriously awesome beat and key matching software to match them to each other, letting you create endless mashups.
But where Dropmix separates scoring and creativity, FUSER attempts to connect the two. When you get into the game, you'll learn how to drop tracks to the beat, pop them to the beat, and tweak the mix.
The game never forces you to drop a certain track in a certain place to increase your score; Specific score-boosting "Audience Requests" encourage you to play a particular song, but it's up to you which track of the song you use and where you place it in your unique mix.
Self-expression is built into every aspect of FUSER. The developers have created a fairly robust DJ customization system where no option is locked to a genre binary, allowing players to express themselves however they wish. Players can customize stage projections and pyrotechnics along with their selected songs, effects, and instruments to personalize the show.
FUSER is not only a game, it is also a kind of digital audio workstation.
Speaking of instruments, not only does the game feature hundreds of songs, each with multiple tracks allowing for millions of possible permutations, but it also features a huge variety of instruments, each with dozens of loops you can switch to at any time. moment, essentially composing your own instrument track.
Ditto for live DJ effects like stutter and filtering. Doing all of this at pace isn't just creative, or just plain awesome, but more importantly, it's essential to getting a high score.
As you progress through FUSER, it becomes clear that it's a misnomer to call it a rhythm game. There's DNA from programs like FruityLoops and Reason here. It's simplified, yes, but FUSER isn't just a game, it's also a kind of digital audio workstation.
Sharing is caring
It scratches a very human itch: you're doing something creative with other people.
And what's a DAW without the ability to edit and export your work?
FUSER takes a bit of inspiration from modern racing games and implements a rewind system in the game's sandbox-style Freestyle mode, where you can cut out a particularly nice part of your mix, rewind it, and perfect it little by little. bit until everything sounds perfect.
In the end, you can post the mix to your own FUSER profile, but you can also natively export the mix to social media in-game. In a world where the next in-person music festival could be years away, c is very, very much appreciated.
The game also features both cooperative and competitive multiplayer, though I anticipate cooperative multiplayer will become increasingly popular as players all work together to refine a mix until it's worthy of a headbang. It scratches a very human itch: you're doing something creative with other people. Together. And you can all save your work at the end and share it with people!
November can't come soon enough
FUSER is much more than a spiritual successor to DropMix; it represents a massive shift in what a rhythm game can actually be.
Oddly enough, this is somewhat reminiscent of how Jackbox Party Packs reinvigorated the board game genre by tying creativity to game elements in a cohesive way.
It seems like such a small and insignificant thing, but the overall effect is that when you're really locked in, not only do you reach that ascending state of the flow of rhythm play, but you also have a deep soul satisfaction in doing something. of creative. It's like singing karaoke with friends and having a whole room cheering you on, or dancing in a club where no one cares how much of an idiot you look.
It's hard to explain if you haven't played the game, but suffice to say it's an amazing experience to create the music you get lost in.
I can only hope that the final product will live up to the expectations of the limited demo. FUSER is set to release on November 10 on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
