Like Gatsby, I guess I know the power of the green light. Out on the dock, down in the dungeon – the light! The light! I reach for it. I can’t wait. It’s not love. It’s better than love. It’s – wait! It’s only the chance to split my fireballs into three and ping them all off in different directions.
SuperfusePublisher: Raw FuryDeveloper: Stitch Heads EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out on PC in Early Access
Superfuse is an action RPG very much in the style of the Diablo games, You see things from an above-ish angle, and you are small as you crawl across the various faces of the game’s worlds, surrounded by hordes of swarming, kiting nasties who it is altogether a pleasure to smash to pieces. You kill, and you get more powerful as you kill. More XP, which means levels and skill points. More gold. More loot. More of an understanding, perhaps, of how the game likes to stage a fight.
And then! The green light.
Green – a strange, wintergreen, dental office green – is the colour of a specific kind of loot. Fuses! Fuses are not armour or weapons. They are runes, essentially, that you can slot into your skill to do something cool to it. If you’re like – HEY! That sounds like the Rune system promised and then not used for Diablo 3! – you’re kind of right. Diablo 3 was to have hundreds of runes you could slot into any skill and get a result. A frog attack might become a rain of frogs or flaming frogs or one giant frog! But that never happened. It hasn’t quite happened here, either, but it’s still pretty cool.
Runes – sorry, Fuses – slot into a skill and make it behave differently. Maybe the fireball divides in three. Maybe it pings off in a zig zag. You can add more fuses to each skill if you can make the placement tetris work, and this is where the fun of the game lies. Fuses can tweak different parts of the skill – they can come at the start, or at the end. They can give you greater cash rewards for kills or set things on fire. It all means that when I play Superfuse, I look for that little flash of wintergreen on the battlefield that tells me something cool is coming my way. You know these games. I wait for town to try on new armour. I might even wait for town to spend skill points. But when a fuse appears I stop everything. I have to know what I’m getting, and how it will change the way I am at the moment.