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Mini-game collections have been dominated by Nintendo in recent years and there’s a good reason. Nintendo makes a living by focusing on gameplay first and graphics second. Although their Mario Party games have lost a little of their luster over the years, there simply isn’t a heck of a lot of options in the party game genre. With Fuzion Frenzy 2 for the Xbox 360, Hudson Soft met Nintendo’s strategy half-way; They almost completely ignored the presentation but unfortunately forgot to focus on anything else. In the end, Fuzion Frenzy 2 is a disappointing, often annoying, 1000 points on your gamerscore.

Fuzion Frenzy 2
Players: 1-4 (2-4 online, 1 player online per console)
Developer: Hudson Soft
Producer: Microsoft
Release Date: 02/01/2007
Achievements: Easy (300 online, 700 offline)

Gameplay

There are basically two different gameplay modes within Fuzion Frenzy 2, Tournament mode is a painful imitation of a multi-round game show or Custom/Frenzy game, which allows you to choose one game at a time or many different mini-games to play consecutively.

Tournament is Fuzion Frenzy 2′s most important and unfortunately, most painful game mode. It’s not particularly the game mode itself that’s the problem, its the inadvertent mini-game that takes place in-between the real mini-games; skipping the horrendous DJ host. I’d like to be tossed in a dark alley with whoever first imagined adding a DJ into a video game, because I have yet to experience one that hasn’t made me want to carve the ears out of my head. Sure, you can turn off the audio of the DJ but you’ll still be forced to watch him mime through the same animations over and over.

Hitting the A button repeatedly just to skip the DJ mumblings is bearable but if you play online, you’ll be forced to listen (or if you turn his voice off, watch) to every single word. Why you can’t skip the DJ cinematic during online play, I don’t know but it will quickly become a deal breaker. Simply because of this one oversight, don’t expect to play the tournament online beyond attempting to unlock the single 100 point Achievement.

The mini-games themselves are actually the only bright spot of Fuzion Frenzy 2, but that’s not saying much. The problem here is that too many of Fuzion Frenzy 2′s mini-games focus on shallow physical combat instead of the individual skills of a player. Victory in almost all of the games is based upon who ends up with the most health, thus they’re mastered simply by avoiding any combat altogether. Understandably, this hardly generates much excitement. There were numerous times while playing online that someone had to step away for a game and still ended up winning the round.

Not all is lost within the mini-games, a few definitely can be fun and generate some laughs. For example, I found Sumo Smash (a game that was in the original Fuzion Frenzy) to generate the most laughter online. Unfortunately, only a handful of the 42 total mini-games are even moderately entertaining, which definitely doesn’t help justify the $50 US price tag.

I mentioned the online play and while your experience will be virtually lag free, it still won’t be much fun. In fact, the only amusement I received from the online play was 1) Listening to every single player admit they were only playing the game online to unlock Achievements and 2) Listening to the moment new players realize how boring and unimaginative most of the mini-games really are and the laughter that ensues from everyone in the room immediately afterwards. Number two was normally followed by a group discussion on how they’d improve the game themselves, many of which I desperately want to share here but out of respect for the gamers (and without a properly signed release) I won’t share the content.

Graphics and Audio

As I mentioned earlier, the graphics in Fuzion Frenzy 2 are uniformly below the next generation standard. If the gameplay was fun and engaging, it definitely could’ve been overlooked. The Xbox 360′s horsepower could’ve easily been used to create screen-warping, brain-teasing mini-games, but once again Hudson Soft checked the box marked, “cheap”. Everything is bland and generally unimaginative about Fuzion Frenzy 2′s presentation, from the character design and menus, to the horrific DJ himself. I should also mention that it’s possible in an online tournament to spend more total time looking at the DJ cinematic than you will actually spend playing all of the mini-games combined.

The audio is equally dissatisfying and as a matter of fact, I just had to turn the game back on to remember if there was any music at all. Two words, “custom soundtrack.” As for the nightmarish DJ, turn off his voice in the options menu immediately because the looping play-by-play of, “How’d that feel, Player 1?” or, “That’s a lot of damage, Player 4″ might just drive you mad.

A Moment on Achievements

As the title suggests, Fuzion Frenzy 2 is worth renting just for the simplicity of the Achievements. If you have a friend to play with online, all of the Achievements can easily be earned in a single evening. I’m convinced that many would never even give this game a play through if this wasn’t the case. Whether you consider that a positive or negative for the case of Achievement Points, is up to you.

Conclusion

I went into Fuzion Frenzy 2 expecting it to be a bad game and in the end, it might just be worse. It’s not because the game itself is fundamentally flawed, but that it’s flaws are inexcusably careless and annoying. In the end, two traits that always equal fun in a meal of this type, character and imagination, were left off the menu. The only true excitement I found was unlocking the final Achievement in Fuzion Frenzy 2 and putting this game out of my mind forever.

A word of advice for whoever develops Fuzion Frenzy 3; Try making simpler games that appeal to everyone instead of designing games that cater to the “Xbox Gamer” demographic. “Xbox Gamers” aren’t the people buying party games.