I finished 3 Stages and I’m on the 4th right now. It doesn’t feel any more creative or open (although the effects are really pretty cool).
I would love a mode where you have to read the crowd and react a bit more to their needs, but allow you some additional time to get to where you want to be with your mix. Right now, the time pressure to drop something, anything, on the next beat.
Are people playing this on console or PC? From the QuickLook it seemed like you’d want a mouse to have good control of the interface, but ideally I’d be playing the music through my home theatre setup.
I’m playing on XSX. The touch targets are large enough it hasn’t been a problem to use the controller.
I’m playing on PS5. Controls seem fine. It’s seems more about accurate button pressing than fine pointer controls.
More thoughts. I’ve completed the campaign. It does get a bit more difficult. I was averaging 3 stars. Failed a couple of times. The difficulty come in the types of things you are asked to do and the amount of time you have to do them. For example, you might need to cue up a couple of different tracks, play and instrument for a set amount of time, drop the cued tracks and fade a different track out. So 4 tasks over a set amount of time, and one of the tasks (playing the instrument) requires you to not be doing anything else. It can get pretty tough when you’re juggling all that, but I can see that with practice you could finish the tasks and then have time to drop some perfectly timed switches to boost your score and hopefully get to 5 stars. For me, the trouble is I don’t really want to do that. As mentioned before, dropping something new every 4 beats doesn’t really sound all that good. I might swing through the campaign again to try to boost my score, but for now I think I’m done with that part of the game.
I messed around a bit with Battle Mode. The instructions are a bit cryptic and an in-game tutorial for this mode really should have been included. It seems like it all boils down to dropping your tracks perfectly on the 1st beat, or the 1st beat of every 4th bar (a musical phrase), or on the pick-up. That and following what what crowd wants to hear.
So both you and your opponent are dropping your tracks and (I think) at some point your tracks are compared to your opponents and the “strong” track wins. In my first and only match I completely smoked my opponent but I sure as hell couldn’t tell you why. In comparing our scores at the end, he had a lot more perfect drop but I think I satisfied the crowd more so I won more matchups than he did. I dunno. It didn’t seem very interesting at all. I don’t think I’ll be returning to battle mode.
So for me that leaves freestyle which in my mind is the most creatively interesting part of the the game, but as Tom pointed out, that pretty much takes the “game” part out of Fuser.
Free preview weekend on Xbox Live Gold! Woohoo! Downloading now.
With the exception of stuff like Audiosurf and Thumper, does anybody really play music games for the “game”? I played a lot of Guitar Hero/Rock Band and for that matter Elite Beat Agent/Oendan, and the whole time all I cared about was getting good at songs I liked. And I say that as someone who tends to need “game” in my sandboxes.
On same on PS for $36 right now so I’m going to pick it up. Think our girls could really get into this.
I played the tutorial and the first campaign mission. I think I’ll wait for a deeper sale for this. My main problem is not with the game, but it’s a problem I have in general with DJ mixes of songs that I like, in that the distinctive parts of a song begin to sound interchangeable and less distinctive. It makes unique music sound less unique. The only track out of the four tracks that really gives a song uniqueness in what I tried this weekend in this game, is the vocal track. Other than that, it feels like all the other tracks feel homogenized and over-processed. I can still hear them in there, and it is kind of neat to take those portions from one song and drop them into another. That is the whole point of the game, after all. But … I don’t know, I’m not feeling it. It’s not bringing out the joy of these songs for me, even though I love the songs.
Welp.
https://www.fuser.com/en-us/news/article/9960/fuser-live-services-sunset
We want to thank you for mixing with us. On December 19, we will be disabling FUSER’s live services and all sales of the game, as well as its DLC. Players who already own FUSER will still be able to play the Campaign and Quick Play with any DLC they have already acquired.
Thank you again for your support and for all the amazing mixes over the years.
Never ended up getting around to this game. It seemed more or less dead on arrival sadly… but somehow they still managed to release nearly $400 in DLC. Not a surprise they’re shutting it down.