My heart always flutters a little when I hear Harmonix is working on anything. After all, this is the same developer that pioneered the plastic instrument rhythm genre that dominated years of my life and oh so much space in my living room. Even beyond turning you into the next great plastic guitar-wielding hero and dragging your friends into your plastic rock band, Harmonix?s pedigree for music and rhythm games speaks for itself. Recently I got the opportunity to speak with the devs at Harmonix about their upcoming music-mixing project, Fuser, as well as get a pretty lengthy hands-on with the game myself.
Harmonix?s return to a standard console game comes after a few years of experimenting with other platforms, notably VR and mobile/tabletop. Fuser in an evolution from ideas curated in DropMix, the card-collecting music mixing game that used a mobile app and physical cards to let players mix popular songs together in a variety of ways. In fact, the goals for Fuser go back even further, with Harmonix wanting to give players the ability to have a lot of creative freedom, not just follow a formula. While it may be a lot of fun to hammer away on a plastic strum-bar while fretting a bunch of colored buttons, in the end it didn?t offer players creative leeway to make the music their own. DropMix was a step towards that, but still centered on a structured ?gamification? that inherently limited the mixes players could make (not to mention complications with distribution of physical...