Maybe its my inner geek, but whenever there is a ship based shooter in space it grabs my attention. Maybe its the huge amount of different types of ships on offer, the feeling of dog fighting among the stars or the epic space opera type storylines they often use. I'm happy to say Fusion: Genesis has all this but also one major important ingredient – addictive gameplay.

Fusion: Genesis is the first release from Starfire Studios (formed by ex-members of the Rare development team) and is at heart a twin-stick shooter but it also has elements of social MMO's included as well. You play a lab assistant who is very early on entrusted with the protection of a unique sentient. The sentients are basically drones which float around your ship helping you out with gunfire and other abilities unique to the three types of sentient – Tank, Healer and DPS. For those not familiar with MMO terms, these equate to defense, healing and damage based drones.



Once you've gone through the tutorial you'll be thrown out into the depths of space and pretty much left to your own devices. The first port of call is to decide which of the five different factions you will join. Keeping to traditional stereotypes, you have the trading Consortium, the law enforcing Praetoriates, the religious Revenant Order, the military based Dominion and the general scum of the universe, the Syndicate.

Each faction has its own set of skills to unlock (I'd recommend completing the basic missions for each faction at the start of the game to unlock all the skills straight away) which tie in with the theme of the faction. For instance the Consortium have defensive and mining skills, while the Dominon have damage based skillsets. Speaking of mining this is an essential part of the game as it helps level up your sentients and thankfully is not that tedious to do as you will spend a fair amount of time doing this to boost your sentient up.

As with any space shooter a very importatnt element are the space ships themselves. The ships come in, once again, the traditional variations of scout, cargo ship, interceptor (all-rounder), heavy fighter and the juggernaut-sized Cruise ship. All the ships actually play differently and have unqiue abiliites too. Best of all in my opinion there are variances between the each factions version of the ship classes so you'll find yourself using different ship types depending on what type of mission your playing and what faction your playing as.

The ships are also visually quite different for each faction and they all are fairly balanced as well. For instance the scout is quick and nimble but weak in defence while the cruisers are bristling with weapon slots and have high defence but literally crawl along the screen. It's actually quite good to see a developer put extra care into a space shooter and not just create different looking ships which just all play the same.




In fact the amount of depth in this game is quite staggering for an XBLA title. Although difficult to figure out due to a severe lack of tutorials or in-game help (though tips are given on the load screens), once you start delving into the menu system (found by pressing the BACK button), you'll find options to customise your pilot and his skills as well as the stats and skills of your sentients and upgrades for your ships. This allows you to really fine tune your ship to your play style and if you screw it up completely, you can always reset the stats and start again (providing you have the right item).

The game itself mainly consists of running missions for your current faction. For most factions you'll have two mission givers, one who will give you a choice of missions which can be filtered by difficulty (and ipso facto the amount of reward) and also a second mission giver who will give you missions in which you use specific ships and setups. This missions can range from scouting out areas in enemy bases, escort missions, finding or repairing tech or full on shoot outs where you've either got to take down a certain number of enemies or try and stay alive for a set amount of time against endless hordes of enemies.

These missions I found out later do tend to get repeated for each faction and sometimes border on the grinding feel I used to get from playing MMO's, but are neatly balanced by the main story missions as well as the individual faction story line missions too. Although many of these are similar in style to the main missions the storylines, as well as the banter and humour from the off screen NPC's, encourage you to push through the grind to access the new missions and see more of the universe Starfire Studios have created.

However there are also multiplayer elements in the game as well. There are PvP and co-op options available so if you spot a player in an opposing faction you can open fire on them to gain PvP credits, but you can also form squadrons with fellow players and take part in specific group missions as well as the extra modes. However there are some glaring flaws in this as once you've joined a squadron there is no way to tell where your fellow squad mates are if they're not on your screen which makes play difficult if your not in a Live party with them.

On top of the main missions there are also several extra modes included (some which you unlock as you play). These include Legion attack in which yourself and up to 3 other can defend your base from attackers which plays as a cross between Horde mode and a Tower defense game, and Warzone in which you play as one of two factions and aim to blow up the enemies battle carrier. This can be quite hectic but a lot of fun as you use your personal collection of ships to take out other players sometimes ganging up with two or three other players to take out an enemy players cruise ship. There is a final mode called Ark Raider, but at time of review I still haven't managed to unlock (despite putting almost 20 hours worth of gameplay in), though from reading the official site it seems that Ark raid is similar to a dungeon in MMO's and has you pitted against unknown enemies with friends for some superb rewards and loot. Completion of these modes gives you special credits which can be used for buying advanced weaponry for your ship.



Graphically, the game is crisp and colourful. The backdrops are detailed and like any good space shooter add a real feeling your travelling through the depths of space. However sometimes with so many ships, firepower and detail on screen it can get a bit confusing as to what's going on, but it doesn't happen that often and when it does your so in the zone that you barely notice. It can also be confusing sometimes over what you can fly over and can't due to the top-down perspective.

Sound effects are what you'd expect from a space shooter and are well done but its the score which stands out. The music is great and the only real shame is its often drowned out by the gunfire on the screen. The score is just the type of epic you'd expect from a space game and certainly adds to the whole atmosphere of the game. In fact the entire atmosphere of the game really drags you in which is a big factor in its addictiveness.

As I've mentioned this is not a short game. I'm currently only 20 hours in and only level 31 and have only finished one Faction's story line let alone finish the main story. Therefore you can easily get 100GS out of this game but the full 200 will take some time, especially the reach level 100 achievement.

There are two main problems with this game though. The first is the lack of help and tutorials. You are given the basic controls and then left to find everything else out for yourself. It took me over an hour before I even found out I could level up my stats and only after exploring the menus did I realise how much customisation was available. However the menu system is quite deep and if you your not used to going through several menus to get to where you need to it may put you off. Don't let it though as the other main problem is how addictive the game is. Since I started playing this I haven't really touched anything else. Even now when the missions are becoming a bit repetitive I just can't stop myself from playing that little bit more just to unlock the next story mission.

Overall, this has to be one of the most in depth and deep games I've come across on XBLA. If you just skim the surface of the game you'll find an enjoyable twin-stick shooter with some well-written storylines, but if you dig deep enough you'll find a in depth shooter which will eat your time away much like the MMO's it borrow elements from.

Overall Score: 9/10