Fuzion Frenzy 2

Written by John Scalzo  on October 05, 2006

Hands-On Preview: 60 second of heaven

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When the Xbox originally launched in 2001, a little game known as Fuzion Frenzy was there. It was a collection of four-player mini-games and, like everything at the Xbox launch, was overshadowed by Halo. Seriously, can you name any Xbox launch titles that aren't Halo or Dead or Alive 3? And now here we are five years later and Microsoft has convinced the boys behind Bomberman (that's Hudson Soft) to create Fuzion Frenzy 2. And in anticipation of the game's November release, a demo has crawled its way onto Xbox Live as part of Microsoft's "Bringing It Home" promotion.

The game will be split up into 40 mini-games across seven planets (Earth, Blazer, Amusen, Icicle, Machina, Moisture and Eternle), each with their own theme. From there, four players are dropped into a mini-game and are given sixty seconds to score as many points as humanly possible. The winner will be beloved by the intergalactic television audience and the loser will be more reviled than Survivor's Jonny Fairplay. Eat your heart out Jeff Probst.

The demo features three mini-games:

Conveyor Belt Chaos (Earth) gives each player a base and drops crates from the sky. Whoever uses their crane to bring the most crates back to their base wins. But players can attack each other and steal crates from their opponent's bases. Sumo Paint (Amusen) is like the old American Gladiators game Atlasphere. The players are stuffed in giant hamster balls and have to run across a hexagonal game board to claim squares by rolling over them. Finally, Ice Treasure Hunt (Icicle) hands each player a flamethrower and requires them to melt the icicles that form on the ground and collect the coins inside. Bronze (1 point), silver (3 points) and gold coins (5 points) complicate matters in this game.

Flying across the game board snatching squares away from my opponents in Sumo Paint was great fun and the pure strategy of picking the right squares to steal so as to maximize the point swing in your favor is perfect. This is turn made the cranes of Conveyor Belt Chaos feel a little slow. Don't get me wrong, both of those games are still very fun over the course of sixty seconds and stealing a box from an opponent to secure the top score in the final seconds is great.

Sadly, Ice Treasure Hunt was clearly the low point of the demo as using the flamethrower and movement felt a little sluggish. I also felt a little cheated that a match often came down to who luckily uncovered the most gold coins.

Like all party games, Fuzion Frenzy 2 almost requires a few friends or an Xbox Live connection (the Live features were not available in the demo). The computer opponents provide a good challenge, but I was regularly blowing them out of the water even on the highest difficulty.

The graphics are good and each game had its own distinct and colorful style and the framerate never faltered. But I thought it was very hard to tell the difference between a bronze coin and a gold coin in Ice Treasure Hunt. Of course, maybe it was just my lowly standard definition TV being overwhelmed by the next-gen power of a party game. On the audio side, the game featured a rather loud rock soundtrack that I could do without and a play-by-play announcer who interjects just enough so as not to be annoying. A game like this doesn't require fancy graphics and a big, booming soundtrack, so I was pleased with what I saw.