FUSER (Nintendo Switch) Review

A game in the rhythm genre can live or die by the strength and variety of its music library. For that, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the selection of songs from multiple genres you get with this is very well put together, and there are ways to gradually get more songs for free at a good pace. This happens either by using currency to unlock them, getting high scores in the Campaign, or raising the account level. The Campaign, especially, keeps a good pace for unlocking songs and cosmetics. The bad news is that there is a large selection of songs available for almost two pounds each, or a launch pack including all the songs and avatar cosmetics for £41.49 or the regional equivalent.

The core and backbone of Fuser's gameplay is how each of the songs are separated. Each track is split into four parts; drums, bass or synth, lead instruments, and lead vocals. It's worth noting that not every song is divided in this way. For example, songs like Expresso by Steve Porter don't have vocals. So, the song just simply has three parts instead. To begin a set, you drop discs from one or more songs onto the four slots on the turntable. While there are only four slots, you can include two or more lead vocal tracks at once or two drum beats.

Fuser does a great job making almost every component from completely different songs sound well together, but that can't always be true. A couple other controls to add a little extra to a mix are raising or lowering the BPM to see what fits, as well as start a raise that causes an automatic crescendo of music. A Campaign mode does a great job of teaching these functions little by little, so it's best to play most of it before you decide to go online.

Scoring for sets, or levels, is based on primarily two things. First, it's always a good idea to place and remove discs on the downbeat of the tempo. If actions are done off beat, your score increases at a faster rate, and the audience bar fills up. The second thing to note, then, is that if this bar depletes the set ends. Another way to keep the audience bar filled is to fulfil audience requests. Sometimes, you may get prompts to add a specific song or instrument into the turntable. Thankfully, failure states can be turned off.

Outside of the Campaign and Freestyle, Fuser features an Online mode where you can collaborate or compete for better scores with other players. Being a Viewer in these rounds can also feel impactful, as you can make suggestions similar to how they work offline. Sometimes, it's really cool to just watch and see what others can come up with on the spot. The one downside here is that the Nintendo Switch version can suffer slowdown while connected to a lobby at times. This can also cause you to miss the timing of downbeats more often than not due to input latency.