Fuzion Frenzy (Xbox)
In the past, I’ve heard Fuzion Frenzy referred to as a cult classic party game, essentially being Mario Party for people who owned an Xbox instead of a Nintendo system. This reputation lead to me thinking it a safe bet for some multiplayer fun, but as we began to play more and more of the game’s minigames, everyone involved was eagerly anticipating when we’d be done playing.
Reading what the game was about didn’t prepare me for such a reaction. The game features a techno style, the characters mixing turn-of-the-century teen fashion with some classic neon future styling, the game even boasting 45 minigames for players to try in either the game’s more focused Tournament mode or through Minigame Frenzy where they can play them however they please. The amount of minigames on offer is deceptive though, as many of them draw from the same few concepts and lightly alter them to technically make a new minigame. Tokens are a constant feature in minigames, players asked to move around and collect them in various different ways but the task is often a slow waiting game where players don’t compete actively with each other so much as hope they’re nearer to the next valuable token spawn than the other players. Many of the minigames don’t actually sound too bad through a basic description, but the execution is where Fuzion Frenzy tends to fail, and for a game that builds its entire focus around these smaller structured experiences, it really shouldn’t have phoned in artificial variety to try and achieve a higher count.
The game’s Tournament mode involves players playing a sequence of minigames based on how many zones of a city you’ll be competing to capture, players playing random minigames in randomly selected zones to build up points they can then wager in Fuzion Frenzy, a unique minigame to Tournament mode where you can choose to put points on the line in the hopes of multiplying them in a rather basic game of collecting orbs and depositing them safely. This is the only mode that really structures how you play the minigames, but it does so in a very poor way, each city zone only containing two major styles of minigames. What this can mean is that the zones you end up playing in Tournament mode can end up containing the worst minigames exclusively, or the highlights of the game’s minigame design will be mixed in with trash if you want any hope of playing it in the more competitive mode. Tournament mode is probably best avoided entirely, as Minigame Frenzy will track your wins during a play session so you can still compete while also avoiding the random bad games Tournament would throw at you constantly. Tournament does at least offer a pretty easy way to subdivide my minigame coverage here while also showing how such a system only limits the ideas the minigames can pursue as they must adhere to certain themes to match their city zone.
We’ll begin with perhaps the worst area, Military Base, where Tank and Pod games are played. Tank games all suffer from the same issue, that unsurprisingly being the tanks. Slow, cumbersome vehicles, the tanks take a while to move anywhere and while they can fire their cannons to blow up players, depending on the minigame, there are often periods of free invincibility given to revived or recently shot players that basically make up for being hurt and allow them to quickly retaliate. Shooting is almost not worth the trouble in some of these tank games, with goals being boring things like driving around slowly to grab tokens or navigating a cramped arena to activate lights. Oddly enough, the tank race is probably the highlight of the group, as it offers something many games in Fuzion Frenzy don’t offer: room for variation. The tanks are still slow, but the race track will have shortcuts that open and close at different intervals to allow players to steal the lead, and here the cannons are great for disabling the other players briefly. There are even bombs on the course to mess people up and items they can grab to shift the style of play! Many games in Fuzion Frenzy don’t have this level of detail, often having one goal and the means to complete them, the arena often flat or not really enhancing the gameplay in any way, leading to many cases of play being too straightforward to really enjoy. Pod games are pretty good example of this, the game throwing you in a circular arena where you try to grab and hold onto white pods with little hover cars. The space is cramped and the pods are huge, players given a dash and a gun to mess with other players with. What this ultimately comes down to is chaos as players are not really given room to do much besides shoot each other and hope they come out on top in the constant trading of the pods.
Outside of games with set conditions for completion like finishing races in a certain amount of laps, Fuzion Frenzy’s game are thankfully pretty short, taking between 1 or 2 minutes to complete, but some of them certainly feel their length, such as the minigames featured Downtown. Fireworks includes some of the easiest to cheese games, with failures in this bunch including games where you need to collect glitter and take it a certain place to earn points or collect three powder kegs to launch together to earn points. The problem with these is how easily they’re broken by someone standing near the area you redeem objects for points, players having little way to avoid having their stuff stolen if they try and play the game legit while some player takes the path of least effort to win instead. Downtown also features music games, and these almost seem tame if a bit basic at first. All of these are essentially just rule changes on the idea that players need to press buttons in time with the music, but the four buttons are the Xbox’s A, B, X, and Y, buttons, the game sometimes asking you to press more than one at a time. You’ll have to hold your controller an odd way to get two buttons that are opposite each other horizontally or vertically, and if you play against the game, they AI of course has no real worlds hands limiting their ability to perform the parts that are actually challenging. The game at least makes them fail the easy button presses to make up for it, but the light variations on these designs really just make it one rhythm minigame with a few slightly different rulesets rather than truly separate games.
Coliseum contains what are called Ice Car games, none really standing out as bad or good as you are given small goals for you to slip around and try to achieve in a circular ice rink. The lack of full control makes things a bit less foregone and a little chaotic, good players still able to hit the right objects in these games but other players able to sneak in when they’re out of control to try and make a comeback. These definitely suffer from the simplicity problem where it’s one goal everyone’s going for though with very little else to each game to draw you back in to play it again. The Rolling Ball games feature the hamster ball like contraptions from the cover of the game and their movement is unusual as well, just making this zone basically slippery control land. Here you might do things like race in the balls or try to bump each other out of an arena, but Sumo gets a bit less interesting once the arena starts shrinking, players not able to build up much momentum and leading to a lot of awkwardly rubbing against each other as they wait out the timer.
The Waterfront features jetboat games, which are mostly straightforward variations of boat racing where an obnoxious foghorn plays every few seconds to remind you you’re at a waterfront, although expect token collecting here and a game where players have to avoid falling down a waterfall by basically just not deliberately endangering themselves. There are orb games here to, these involving players competing as regular humans running about trying to hold onto, deliver, or get rid of glowing orbs in arenas that don’t support the design well, there being an escalator room that boils the action down to running in a circle to steal the orb or get rid of it depending on the rule set. These aren’t as bad as some games, but again their simple design can lead to boring play approaches if players quickly keen to what tactics work far too well. The Power Station zone features bug splatting games, players earning points here by smashing bugs with a character-specific weapon, but the action has very little audio feedback or impact to the act of squashing the giant insects. You can’t feel the force in your attacks, so point accumulation doesn’t feel very satisfying, although the bug types are at least varied and give out different points based on their types here. Many games in Fuzion Frenzy have a similar issue where points almost seem silently accrued, the counters at the bottom telling you how well each player is doing but very little visual or audio feedback making it clear who’s winning in the more point-heavy events, another aspect that makes the token collecting games feels so bland and uninvolved.
The second part of Power Station actually puts us into some of the more enjoyable minigames, those being Hopper games. On foot much like in the orb games, these are simple challenges of jumping over danger to try and outlast the other players. Many minigames in Fuzion Frenzy have static difficulty or don’t change up their rules during play, but these Hopper games get gradually faster and harder until a winner is found. Outlands is perhaps the best of the bunch though, not because it has the best of the few decent minigames, but for having the least offensive batch. Tail-bone games here are similar to Tron cycles where players driving around on bikes and leave a dangerous trail behind that can be crashed into or used to circle around point items in certain modes. Oddly enough, a Firework game randomly fell in to spoil this bunch and its sadly one of the most boring too, with Burning Fuse challenging you to only launch fireworks of your color as they come by on a conveyor belt, launching them by lighting your fuse at the right time. You can paint a rocket your color, but that requires someone first accidentally launches one of yours by mistake, so it’s rarely an option. Thus, you spend most your time waiting for the few rockets that are yours to slowly scroll by, not really participating save in short bursts that aren’t even fun when done. Luckily, other Outlands games include a drill based game where you destroy the ground you pass over and have to try and either survive or collect the most tokens possible before dying in one of the few decent token collecting games on offer. There are also some more actively competitive games than usual here in the form of explosive games where you are trying to hit each other with bombs, players asked to focus on their opponents a bit more actively than in some games since they’re also the target. Bomb tossing controls are a bit awkward at times, but it serves as perhaps the strongest form of direct competition in a game filled with a lot of trying to passively outdo each other.
THE VERDICT: Fuzion Frenzy’s selection of 45 minigames sounds like it has potential for some fun party game play, but the lousy Tournament mode ended up slotting many of them into similar half-baked designs rather than having varied, unique gameplay challenges on offer. Since each minigame needs to fit a theme of the city zones you conquer in Tournament mode, concepts are reused and rules lightly changed to pass them off as new games, but this wouldn’t be a problem if the games were structurally sound. There are some highlights to be found like the jumping challenges and bomb battles, but many games are about passive competition where the action is straightforward and bland. Minigames often have one thing to do that remains too consistent during play, making the action wear thin quickly even though the games are often already short. A lack of feedback for your actions also further makes some games with potential like bug-splatting less enjoyable, but other games are just too slow, easy, and dull to enjoy or too chaotic and messy to really put in the effort to try and win.
And so, I give Fuzion Frenzy for Xbox…
A TERRIBLE rating. Twisted System, Tank Tracks, Rubble Alliance, Erodeo, Pinball, Bombstruck, Blast Man Standing, Volt Vault. These are the games on offer that I think are either good or are close enough to being good, and many of these fit into the jumping game, drilling game, or bomb throwing game categories. While there are a few mediocre games to be found as well in the bunch, we’ve essentially got 8 games with decent replayable design that isn’t ruined by slow uninvolved play, bad concepts, poor mechanical implementation, or ease of exploitation. Your personal preferences may lead to you being more forgiving, and some games are just kind of okay like the Ice Car version of Hockey, but most of the package is hard to stomach and the decent ones in the bunch aren’t really engaging enough to justify playing it. The Tournament mode will force you into the badly designed games more often than not, the AI players can either be comically bad at easy games or insanely good at hard ones, and overall, the attempt to try and connect all the minigames to this mode just lead to creativity being sacrificed for the sake of adhering to theme.
Not every game in Fuzion Frenzy had to be good, but far too many of the repeated ideas are done poorly and they spoil the quality of the minigames they infect. For a minigame-based party game, it feels like the only time you have much impact on the other players is in the games where sabotage is too powerful, but at least that is preferable to the way most of the minigames have you wait for a timer to end to see who just so happened to have done the best at some task that is often too slow or too frenzied to get invested in.