Hands on with Superfuse (Preview)

Hands on with Superfuse (Preview)

There’s always room for another game that lets me do 3 things: hit enemies, pop up numbers showing how much damage I did, and then drop loot of various, color-coded tiers. Superfuse, from developer Stitch Head and publisher Raw Fury, is hoping to be the next game to check all of those boxes, with some twists — some that will appear more novel than others.

Superfuse is an isometric Action RPG set in the far future where corporate elites used vast wealth to “save” humanity and spread beyond the earth, the wealthy stayed on top, eventually using their fortunes to make themselves immortal. Oh, and they also gave themselves superpowers (if you’re stuck at the top, you might as well get it all). They were nice enough to give other people powers too, so that these “Enforcers” could do the dirty work on their behalf.

Currently, Superfuse has five different classes of enforcers, but only the Berserker was available for this preview, though. A couple things stood out immediately to me after jumping into the game and the hub world: the comic book influences, showing themselves as a method of exposition with both static and motion panels, and the cell shaded aesthetic blended wonderfully.

After acquainting myself with the hub and picking up a couple of items and a quest, I got into the real meat of the game, the skill tree. In the interest of time, I had access to the full tree and unlimited skill points. Skill trees are unique to each ability and then are segregated into groups depending on when they take effect: on use, on hit, on kill, and on end. This made for a lot of different possibilities, more than I had time to try, even with everything unlocked.

I pieced together a build based on an attack that generated shrapnel and then split and ricocheted, and proceeded to clear the map swiftly, but in the “it feels good to be overpowered” kind of way. Anyone that’s put together a successful build in similar ARPGs will know the feeling. The process was a bit more involved than I had originally anticipated, with the option of choosing both active and passive modifiers, each branching into a unique pattern depending on which augmentation I had chosen. Increasing the complexity increased the mana cost, which helps to control builds from becoming just a bit too powerful.

All said and done, I enjoyed my 30 minutes with Superfuse, and I’ll have my eye out for it when it enters early access for PC (date not yet announced).

This preview was based on an early build of the game presented to SideQuesting by the publisher.