Fuse Demo Is Kind Of Crazy!

Later this month, Insomniac Games launches a new property called Fuse.  This is the company responsible for the Ratchet & Clank and Resistance franchises, two absolute favourites within this particular household.  Therefore anything new out of Insomniac gets a serious look from me, just on spec.

They released a demo of Fuse yesterday, on the 360 and PS3.  It's huge, and took a long time to download, but once I had it, I immediately gave it a try.  It starts off fairly conventionally, with you moving your character up a cliff wall and learning the controls as you go.  Then you have to break into a facility guarded by tons of armed AI's, which again was nothing too unusual.  Except that... Well, it's a coop-based game, so you're on a squad of four, where the other three can be AI-controlled, operated by other players (locally or remote), or you can take turns 'being' each of the four by 'jumping' between them.  (I alternated between the first and third scenarios last night.)  Each character has different weapons and skills, which means that the experience changes quite a bit as you switch between them.  I thought that was pretty cool, actually.

Being squad-based, there's a lot of teammate-reviving involved, which reminds me of the Medic role from Resistance 2 and others.  The controls, in general, were very easy to learn and basically followed the now-standard Call of Duty model.

A little later in the demo, you encounter a bunch of 'boss' types: enemies in big armour units who require a lot of work to kill.  There are several of them coming at you and your squad all at once, and I think my experience during that portion of the demo was best summed up by Vicki, as soon as it was over: "I don't think you were breathing during that part!"  Now, technically, I must've been breathing, as it lasted several minutes.  But it was pretty damn crazy, I'll tell you.  I quit after that part, even though the demo goes on even further.  I figure I need to try the demo again, with at least one other live player (hopefully Boneman) in the game with me, just to see what that's like. 

Fuse could very easily end up being my next video game purchase, sometime toward the end of May.