Fuser can be best be described as a festival DJ simulator, where hopeful spinners take control of a mixing station, as they slam popular songs together to create medleys for an audience to enjoy. Like every Harmonix game before it, there are dozens of songs to sample and mess around with. We got our hands on Fuser’s PAX East demo, which will be shown off all weekend on the show floor to demonstrate the basics of the title.
Everything starts out simple, with four open slots on your DJ mix stand for players to place their mixes. There are four different track options per song: lyrics, percussion, drums and bass. Mixing these different elements of specific songs can create an entirely new melody, which is essentially the point of the game. The demo only features a handful of songs, with classic rock hits like Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” modern hit Billie Ellish’s “bad guy” and, of course, LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem.”
The goal of the game is to play to a crowd’s tastes and make them like you. At the start you pick a selection of songs that gets added to your “crate,” and from that crate players make their music. The demo features a giant festival stage with a human face and lions to the side, spinning in front of a hungry crowd that’s eager to hear that bass drop.
The goal is to keep the crowd engaged as you take requests and remove or add certain song elements based on the feedback. A virtual audience member might want you to drop a pop song into the queue or take out all the vocals, adding a sense of strategy to what is mostly a glorified mash-up machine.
Taking lyrics about how we will one day meet our makers and throwing them into the bassline of Ellish and drums of LMFAO creates something that wouldn’t sound too out of place on a Coachella stage.
The gameplay loop of Fuser takes inspiration from Harmonix’s less than successful Dropmix card game, which lets players take certain aspects of songs and throw them together to win. Needing an app and a board to play, the tabletop offering never really met its full potential, but the gimmick of mixing songs remained.
For this title, Harmonix has partnered with NCSoft, best known for making Korean MMOs and murdering City of Heroes. NCSoft has supposedly given Harmonix enough autonomy and a budget to push this title to its limits, offering enough marketing to hopefully get it in front of DJ hopefuls around the globe.
For those looking for a more casual experience similar to DJ Hero but without the clunky peripheral, this game may be worth a try. Its campaign and late-game additions are still being kept under wraps, but music fans might get a kick out of the base concept. If you aren’t a fan of creating mash-ups or EDM music, this might be a hard sell. If you are just looking for a rhythm game with tight gameplay, Cadence of Hyrule or Osu! might prove to be a more suitable alternative.
Fuser will be available on Xbox, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC in 2020.
