‘Fuzion Frenzy 2’ not so much frenzied as boring

This is from today's edition of The Herald-Dispatch.

In looking for a new game to play through with my wife, I thought that “Fuzion Frenzy 2” for the Xbox 360 would be a perfect fit.

I was quickly disabused of this notion.

Far from being a frenzy of any sort, this collection of mini-games sort of lies there, daring you to try to beat the fun of it. But, at least in my experience, there really isn’t any to be had.

What will strike you almost as soon as the disc starts spinning is the cheapness of the game. I don’t mean cheap as in unfair, I mean cheap as in the characters’ lip-sync is so bad that it looks like a dubbed movie that was originally in a language consisting only of “Aaaahhhh” and “Ooooh.” Cheap. I mean cheap as in the music sounds like someone kicked Moby’s Casio down a flight of stairs made of broken glass. Cheap.

The setting is some sort of intergalactically famous game show from a future world where people only wear hip-hop-inspired glowing armor. You travel from planet to planet playing mini-games and collecting points for top performances. Whoever has the most points after a few games wins the planet. To win, a player has to dominate a certain number of planets that you set before playing.

The problem with the game is really in the mini-games that are offered up. Some are as simple as pressing buttons in sequence, some are more complicated and none of them are very fun.

There are rudimentary instructions provided with each game, but they don’t have enough information a lot of the time. Sometimes the games are hard to understand just because you can’t believe that they’re as simple as they seem.

The oddest design choice though has to be the inclusion of multiplier cards given out to players. Even when you do manage to take the top spot in a game, someone who performed more poorly than you can rocket past you in points by doubling or even quadrupling their award for second or third place. More than make things seem more frenzied and unpredictable, it just ends up being infuriating.

Needless to say, my wife and I didn’t have a lot of fun with this, but I can see how a group of four people might be able to squeeze out a few chuckles, just so long as they don’t expect long-term entertainment.

Also, don’t expect too much from the online multiplayer, as it’s pretty hard to find anybody except those few trolling for achievement points playing the game. I know at one point, I went 10 minutes without being able to find a game to join ... which is about as far from frenzy as you can get.