I’m no stranger to action RPGs. With thousands of hours spent across the likes of Diablo II and III and even more in Path of Exile, you could say I’m a fan. There’s something very satisfying about carving your way through hordes of enemies, collecting piles of shiny loot to make your characters strong, and creating character builds to really customize how they play. So when I saw the upcoming ARPG Superfuse by Stitch Head Entertainment, I was immediately excited by the comic book-style art direction and also the sci-fi setting. Most ARPGs opt for fantasy, so it was a nice change of pace to play something where character classes and skills had futuristic flair.
Upon loading up Superfuse in preview, I had three options for class: Elementalist, Berserker, and Technomancer. The Berserker looked like he eats whey protein powder raw and benches a truck for fun, and I was tempted to choose him to smash through my enemies. However, plenty of games have a Berserker-style class, but not many let you choose a class where you can live out your Doctor Octopus fantasy like the Technomancer — so I had to try it out.
Running around the awesome comic book-style world on my four giant robotic spider legs felt great! I loaded up on some quests and then was ready to go kill enemies. To my surprise, the Technomancer combat didn’t involve the smaller robotic arms that wave around your equipped weapons. Instead, it uses a ranged attacking play style where you shoot out deadly metal shards. While it seemed a waste of perfectly strong weaponized robot arms, impaling and exploding my enemies with large metal shards was satisfying.
Opening up the skill tree after leveling up revealed I had two talent tree paths I could progress down to unlock new skills and passive abilities. For Technomancer, this was the Metal tree and the Minions tree. The metal tree leads to more metal-based ranged attacks like a giant swirling scrap ball attack that damages enemies in its path and picks up metallic scrap left on the floor from your other attacks to grow even larger as it goes.
The Minions tree involves, well, you guessed it, minions. Leveling it up gave me access to little robot companions like the Buzzjaw that has a saw blade around its body and loves to run up to enemies and mow them down. I also had a Lazerbeak, which was another little robo buddy that specialized in ripping through enemies at range with their little laser cannon face.
As I tore my way through groups of enemies, I collected my piles of shiny loot, picking up new armor and weapons to upgrade what I had and improve my damage, but the drops that were the most interesting were the skill mods. As you level up and allocate your skill points within a DNA-shaped skill tree, you gain more memory space that lets you attach more of these mods to your skills, and man, these can make your attacks ramp up quickly.
Each skill has a grid system, and you can slot in mods that expand out the grid, assuming you have enough memory space to slot them in. They drop with a wide variety of effects that can both actively change how the skill functions, like allowing projectiles to ricochet, fork, or even zigzag. Other mods can be more passive, like on-kill mods that increase loot rarity or restore energy (mana) on kill. This makes for a really interesting customization experience that is quite flexible in how you can build out your attacks.
The single big metal shard I fired out at the start of the game rapidly evolved into a more complex attack as I stacked on mods. Before I knew it, I was firing multiple projectiles at once that sprayed into my enemies, pierced through them into the enemies behind them, and dropped slowing and damaging caltrop spikes underneath them at the same time. It felt pretty badass firing out this spray of metal death while my minions ran around going nuts sawing and laser-blasting. I can see these mods making skills more and more ridiculous as you level higher and add 10 different mods to a skill.
Superfuse was a lot of fun to play in preview, and I’m looking forward to the mayhem of playing through in co-op as well. If you enjoy action RPGs, I would highly encourage you to take a look at the game. Superfuse has arrived into Steam Early Access as of a few days ago, so go check it out.
