Fuse is the kind of game the word ‘mid’ was made for. It’s not bad and you can even have some fun with it, but it’s got nothing to get excited about and after you’re done with it you won’t think about it ever again.

Fuse’s main problem is how it’s boring in spite of itself. One of the playable characters has a weapon that turns enemies into wormholes, something straight out of a Ratchet & Clank game, and it gets old much, much faster than you’d think it would. The final boss features you fighting a giant mech on the outside of a space station, yet is somehow completely unremarkable. This game just has such a derivative energy to it, it’s like if you asked a computer to generate a 7th generation third-person shooter. You and your generic squad mates killing generic enemies in generic locations as part of a generic ‘save the world’ plot.

Insomniac Games was arguably the hardest working studio of the 6th and 7th gen and this is not a compliment. In the 17 years between the release of the studio’s first game, Disruptor, and that of Fuse, Insomniac pumped out 18 games. Their 19th, Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus, was released the same year as Fuse and on top of that, Insomniac was conceptualizing and pitching Sunset Overdrive while both games were in development. This short turnaround time between games meant Insomniac had to leave a ton of stuff on the cutting room floor simply because there just wasn’t time to implement it, and I can’t help but think of how this culture of crunch affected Fuse. Had it been given more time in the oven, would we have gotten something more fleshed out, more exciting? Perhaps, but this is the game we’re left with. One that has been completely forgotten and deserves to be.