Parents' Guide to Superfuse

What happens when you toss together one part comic book style with one part dungeon crawler with a little extra sci-fi flair for flavor, but take it all out of the developmental oven way too early? You get the half-baked action role-playing gaming experience that is Superfuse. First off, it's hard not to get a sense of déjà vu when playing the game. It feels like much the game is borrowed liberally from a certain iconic fantasy franchise, but with the names and places changed to a futuristic setting as some sort of weird witness protection deal. And while they may say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Superfuse's buggy gameplay and unfinished development are less of an homage and more of an insult.

It has to be said that, at its very core, Superfuse doesn't seem like a bad game. The visuals and animations are good and the basics of the gameplay could make for a decent adventure. The problem is everything else built, or more accurately unbuilt, on that foundation. The main toolbar doesn't scale with the screen size, often leaving it shrunk down to an almost unreadable and unusable level. Also, the game's major hook, "fusing" extra enhancements to powers to change how they function, is generally left up to players to figure out on their own. Worse still, even when you do sort out how it's supposed to work, oftentimes the end result doesn't function as advertised. For example, adding Stun to attacks might stop enemies from moving for a second, but never stops them from attacking. Or an enhancement that's supposed to split off projectiles into a spread never splits anything. And this is only the stuff that's supposed to be functional. There's still lots of abilities and features that simply say "In Development," leaving players scratching their heads about what might fill in the blank sometime down the road.