A brilliant music mixing tool trapped in a bad video game.

Ever wanted to create cool music mixes but things like matching tempo & key, handling transitions, and making your own beats are all just too much? Then get Fuser.
Fuser is one of the coolest and most accessible music creation tools I have ever used. It takes all the stuff that DJs have to do manually and streamlines it so you can just slap some songs together to make something that is usually better than it has any right to be.

But Fuser isn’t just a music creation tool, it’s a video game. A video game that makes you play through its entire excruciatingly boring campaign to progress. And by the end of the campaign you still won’t be high enough level to unlock all the songs, instruments, and effects.

The campaign is basically just a tutorial for the music creation tool stretched into something that’s about 5x as long as it should be. The campaign is bad. The characters are bad. And even playing a set for a demanding crowd is often more stressful than enjoyable. You’ll spend the whole song watching the timer, trying to meet the objectives that pop up in the corner, while also trying to meet audience requests that often conflict with the set requirements of the stage. It’s simply not fun. And the fact that you basically have to play it kind of sucks.

Honestly the best part of this game is just popping into freeplay mode and making music. What does it sound like if I take the bass and melody lines of Bad Guy and mix them with the vocals of Take On Me in the minor key? Turns out it sounds hauntingly rad. What if I mix the vocals of 4 songs from 4 different genres? That’s unsurprisingly bad. That is where the fun of this game is - and if that all sounds fun to you, get Fuser. But you’ll need to put in some time with other less-fun aspects of the game if you want to expand your DJ library.

+ Brilliant and accessible music creation tool that makes it easy to just create fun stuff

- Music, samples, and effects are locked behind a slow leveling system
- Terrible campaign that basically just serves as an overly-long tutorial
- The actual act of playing the levels just isn’t fun

I don't think there's anyone still interfacing with Fuser that is willing to go to bat for every underperforming aspect. At Best, you'll get someone who is in love with the (astonishing) tech of the game enough to sideline the rest of the package. And honestly? That's more valid than usual here, if only due to the game's wide discrepancy between "Freestyle" and, well, every other mode. You might as well launch a separate .exe with the differences.

Yet even then, it's all a little muted to me. While I don't use it derogatorily, "toy" is the word that best describes the whole thing. Its primary purpose is to be immediate and as wrinkle-free as possible. It's good at that! What it's less good at is capitalizing on moments of bliss, when every stem on the platters works with the key and mode and tempo. Sure, you can capture it, maybe employ it later, but it's really difficult to further establish or scrutinize it. The way the songs passively loop into themselves is the toughest nuance to love for me, as it is both the driving force behind the game's success and also the one unchanging aspect that makes it so it's almost impossible to feel completely in control of expression.

I love the basic gameplay here but
a: the campaign is kind of busted and kind of just seems like a way to remind you of all the features you already have access to in Freestyle, which is the real game
b: the selection just kind of bottoms out at a certain point and I ended up with no incentive to level up because nothing I can buy is interesting
C: there's a funny little glitch on PS4 where you can only export like a minute of video before the audio stops happening and in a game explicitly about music that kind of blows.

Still, it's a game I can sit with and be enthralled for like an hour straight just putting different stuff together, I love it.

The real fun in this game comes from messing around in Freestyle mode and combining different songs, especially with the thousands of custom songs people have modded into the game. You can make combinations that sound surprisingly great, or you can put the vocals of Bring Me to Life on top of the instrumental of Call Me Maybe. Unfortunately, in order to learn about all the different things you can do and unlock new things, you need to play the campaign mode, every level of which drags on for far too long.

A pretty fun game, but essentially it's a digital form of Dropmix, Harmonix's killer board/card game that had most of the same principles as this. This actually expands it a bit, and to great effect. I dunno how they could have pulled this off better beyond maybe some campaign type random missions thrown into the freestyle or like an arcade mode that doesn't require MP. But regardless it's a lot of fun just making your own mixes to the point it doesn't really need it. The campaign itself is just an extended tutorial that lets you hone your ear for finding the right kind of cues for a good set. It feels like they've iterated on the DJ hero idea over the years due to DJing being a central unified cross-section of music lovers. I just hope this can become a bit of a virtual DJ software where you can insert your own stems(via mods, probably) and it gets a ton of DLC over the years.

Edit in 2024: RIP. I wish you had flown farther but I'm glad you live on in some way in fortnite.

Fuser, for people who want to make mashups but don't know how to use FL Studio

I first heard about this game through Acai, and loved all his videos he made of all his silly mashups in this game. Then i heard that the game was removed off digital storefronts and he graciously provided the community with a drm free copy of the game.

After i started playing, and messed around with mods, i fell in love with this game. it's so unbelievably fun to mess and toy around with it you can lose hours doing it. Being able to mix my 2 favorite songs together and create an unholy abomination is simply something no other game can provide

There are a few things i dislike about this game, however, mainly it's artstyle and the fact that it got pulled off digital storefronts

still, if you can somehow get yours hands on a copy of this game, please for the love of god do play it, and try it with a couple of mods as well, you will not regret it

Fuser combines fun gameplay and is an absolute vibe!

It has a nice section of songs and reminds me of remix albums like mouth moods by Neil Ciciereiga. It has a decent selection for the character creator , it may have a basic art style but you are still able to make something you will enjoy. The music is mastered so well and I just vibe and as my features are added in the main mode I see myself experimenting with these features. The online mode is fine nothing to good but cool to see other people's creations and has not too many people on the servers. DLC is cheap and has some good songs but can be unappealing but by adding one new song can spice up the whole gameplay. I haven't completed this game but hope to return to it but sometimes there isn't alot keeping me to this game unless I am on a roll but I hope to check it out again sometime. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who loves music or especially to people who make music.
4/5

I've been a big fan of Harmonix pretty much since their inception, and now that they are stuck in the fortnite gulag I decided it was time to check out some of the things that they made that went right under my radar, with Fuser being one of those titles.

Harmonix games have always loved breaking music down to its individual stems, from frequency/amplitudes lane shifting to rock bands multiple instrument play. Fuser basically takes harmonix's fascination with stems to make an incredibly simple to use and fun mixing program. This is the REAL way to do "DJ hero". You get four tracks and can put any stem from up to 24 songs you select into them. They basically figured out a way to make a music sandbox game, which is insanely rad.

That being said, because of the open-ended freeform nature of the game, turning it into an actual game is insanely boring. The singleplayer campaign essentially forces you to check menial things off of a checklist within a given time, which kind of sucks the entire creative aspect of the game right out as you are forced to bend the mix to the games will and not necessarily your own. It also drags on far longer than I want, with the most generic cookie-cutter lookin mfers as NPCS. When I first showed my friends this game they thought it was fortnite, and ngl if that happens you know you've homogeonized your artstyle too far.

Despite the slog of a singleplayer, I've had way too much fun in freestyle mode to dislike this game. On PC, there's an entire treasure trove of custom music to install, and with mods this game becomes a 10/5 shitposting factory. I've spent so many nights DJing in VC with my friends as we all watch the mix flip-flop from the most rancid sounding trash to the freshest beats in the modern day and back again. The freestyle mode really is where the fun in the game lies, because there it's on YOU to determine how good you are mixing instead of the game. We've also made a decent song meta of what songs are universally OP in mashups, with jamiroqual's Canned Heat and the Black Eyed Peas' Let's Get It Started working no matter what whereas something like Bob-omb Battlefields' clown horns always bob-omb the entire vibe that the mix was going for. The doofy trumpets in Psy's new face are always fun to drop in when people least expect it, as is the iconic trash synth in Cbat (which surprisingly works more often than not).

It's absolutely something worth giving a try (if you know where to get it, the game has been delisted for a while), because there's really an endless amount of ways to mess around in this game, and everyone will mess around in a completely different way depending on their music tastes. Making stupid mashups has never been so streamlined and easy! Just don't touch the actual campaign with a 300 foot pole, download a complete save file or something if you want all the unlocks.