Superfuse is an evil genius' lab for splicing bizarre skills together
Oh the menus.
Let me get this out of the way quickly: Superfuse looks really good. It's basically a Cel-shaded action RPG in the cut of Diablo. Four-player co-op or single-player fun. There's a comic book presentation - and a comic book plot, about people who have become gods and whatnot - which means that gorgeous comic book panels pop up during cut scenes and the designers have been wonderfully bold with the application of halftone. I am a fan of halftone. And from hubs you are despatched to various procedurally wrangled dungeons to splatter sci-fi horrors and take on bosses and pick up loot. Repeat.
All of this looks great. I had a build for a while and was very happy splattering and looting - doing the inventory Tetris thing and the skills-bar glissando. Mutant crabs. Horrible shambling monsters. And me at the heart of it, a Berserker class who seemed to be lamping people for the sheer luminous joy of it all. (The voice acting is supremely charismatic, incidentally - courtesy of Eli Harris in this case, I think.)
Right. That's out of the way. Now I want to talk about the point where I almost fainted with happiness. Reader, it's to do with skills.
Skills are the most critical organs of any action RPG I reckon. If they aren't working, it doesn't matter how good any of the other stuff is. Torchlight 2 is the skills - those wild, seismic things you can trick your heroes out with. Ghosts and laser beams and magma. A joy!
Superfuse understands skills. Like, really understands skills. So much so that there is a screen in the menus - I love action RPG menus - in between "Talents" and "Group" called Skill Creator. Skill. Creator. I almost wept with happiness. Maybe I will weep now. Maybe I am weeping as I type this. It would explain the typos.
So you have a skill like Slam, which is exactly what it sounds like. But then you start to plug skill points into this sort of diagram of possibilities. Too complex to be a tree. Almost an electrical circuit, or something to do with the Kabbalah. Maybe you want projectiles. Maybe you want the projectiles to zig-zag. Maybe you want them to home in on enemies. Maybe you want them to split. Maybe you want them to zig-zag, home in and split. If you've got skill points you can do all of this.
And that's just the projectiles side of things.
But say you put in a bunch of points - projectiles, energy efficiency, this is still just one skill of many, remember - and then you unlock a point on the schematic called "Wildcard". This is where you can slot in your Skill Fuses, which make things even weirder.
Think the runes from Diablo 3, but with a bit more freedom. Add poison damage. Ice damage? All sorts of damage. Fuses, I gather, go across all skills. You collect them and then plug them in where you want them. They take the elaborate decision tree that's already baked into each skill itself and then make it truly special.
So yes. Superfuse gets skills. This is just one skill, from one class. And already I can't wait to get back to it, to tinker and plot and experiment. Don't get me wrong, the rest of the game looks wonderful. But I am aching to get back to the menus.