Fusion Paradox – Review

Little over a year ago an archaeologist, probably called Jimdiana Bones discovered a mysterious sarcophagus which seemed to mentally effect everyone nearby, moved to the facility of the Supernatural Threat Reduction Agency, there’s a strange power surge which sends everyone into an insane zombie-like craze.

Now our trusty protagonist agent wakes up as the only sane person in the building, so it’s up to you to climb through the floors, to reach and defeat the mysterious entity at the source of all this chaos.

Fusion Paradox is a twin-stick, rougelike shooter with an isometric viewpoint and plenty of enemies spawning to give a real bullet-hell experience similar to a side-scrolling game. Merging an isometric view with a top-down genre and a side-scrolling system isn’t the easiest genre to digest so let’s take a dive into the Supernatural Threat Reduction Agency and see what’s going on.

You’ll start off with a simple pistol and some awkward feeling controls, the four shoulder buttons function to shoot, dodge, change weapons and swap energy, the default scheme felt awkward, but there’s a few preset options and I was eventually able to find a setting that felt a little more fluent.

Running around with the left stick, you’ll have to shoot all enemies to clear a room, before moving onto the next, there’s also traps dotted around, but as well as evading incoming bullets, the dodge will do a great job of avoiding any damage thanks to a brief spell of invulnerability. you’ll also find some doors, traps and even enemies can only be engaged with when you’re either blue or yellow, so that’s where the energy swap comes in.

Thankfully you’ll find a wide selection of weapons on your travels and while some can be limited to firing when you match the weapons energy, there’s plenty of options and while ammo is usually limited, even the default pistol with infinite ammo is pretty effective thanks to it’s reliable predictability. The main art is to keep moving… As with any good bullet-hell shooter, there’ll be plenty of projectiles heading your way, and if you stay still too long, or get trapped in a corner, you’ll soon succumb to the enemies which range from the usual slow and powerful, to ranged or more agile attackers who might not need quite as many bullets to take them down.

Initially the game does feel fairly challenging, but after a few quick deaths, I found myself progressing to the final stage without too many troubles, the dodge is an increidbly powerful tool, and you’ll also find other abilities you can collect between rooms, such as dropping an explosive when you dodge, or poisoning eveyrone in the room.

Graphically, while it doesn’t look “4K” in overall presentation, it runs perfectly smooth and despite the amount of action going off on screen, the graphics never presented an issue on clarity, the main downside with presentation is the isometric view, when you’ve got bullets flying around at all angles, it’s sometimes a little tough to judge exactly how close to them you might be, which often leads to “accidentally” taking on damage, and when you’re starting off with only 3 hearts of health, it doesn’t take too many misjudged bullets to ruin things.
Thankfully you have a second set of hearts for each power, so as long as you’re quick and fluent with switching your power, you can take on a lot more damage before dying.

Dying really needs to be avoided at all costs, as while you can “save your progress” after clearing a floor, with Gundalf the wizard, the forgetful old fool will forget all about you if you die, so you’ll be back to square one.

With procedurally generated layouts, the facilities defenses will also swap around the rooms, so dying really does feel like starting all over again, with only a handful of upgrades carrying over, but I find success is more dependent on a little RNG rather than solely on how many times you’ve tried and failed previously but it’s always worth exploring any obelisks you find on your travels for the persistent upgrades to health, and adjustments such as the dodge cooldown, which ultiamtely help the more you play.
A good run, even with a near vanilla start, would get me through each level with ease as I dodged my way to victory and utlilised every weapon at my disposal, but if unlucky, maybe poor unpredictable weapons, busy early rooms or awkward placement of traps, I’d be dead before I knew it.

Thankfully though aside from the awkward isometric view, I only really encountered one other issue, which was sadly quite significant. Working through the majority of the game in what was likely one of the last few rooms, an enemy became stuck, I’m not sure if they wher einvisbly or trapped beneath the floor, but I couldn’t progress without killing them, and I couldn’t see or hit them, meaning my only option was to throw away my entire progress to restart from scratch, no doubt a bug that’ll be ironed out eventually, but annoying all the same, thankfully this only happened on one occsion.

The other downside has to be the audio, background music is so quiet it’s barely noticeable and the constant repetitive tack, tack, of gunfire soon becomes tiresome, I played a short time on near-silent and didn’t feel like I was missing anything at all, so the sound has to go down as a big dissapoitment for me.
However, despire a few shortcomings, arriving at only $9.99, I think Fusion Paradox is well worth checking out.
Sure, I wasnt a big fan of the view, or the control scheme, and I think the energysystem switching between yellow and blu eand being limited to specifci weapons with each, over complicated what’s otherwise a fun and enjoyable game.
But it’s a quick blast of fun, something you can pick up for half an hour and still feel like you’ve made some progress, even if it’s only ended in another death.

Overall Fusion Paradox is far from perfect, but it’s a fun shooter that’s worth checking out, at a reasonable price.
Fusion Paradox will release on Xbox on the 1st November at $9.99

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