Worth the price of admission?

So, Fuser...I have loved most Harmonix games. Love looking for mashups on YouTube and watching the recent GB and MinnMax Fuser streams, but I'll be honest, I'm not creative musically at all. I play the drums, but was always in cover bands.

Is there enough gameplay to hook me? I know the campaign is more of a tutorial. If I could convince one of my friends to pick it up to have someone to play with, I think I'd be completely in, but they're not interested. I totally get the $60 price with all the licensing involved, but I'm wondering if I should wait until it hits a sale on PSN (if that were to happen someday).

Any thoughts from people who bought the game?

PS - @vinny and @janman were mixing some great stuff!

So hey! I'm a dogshit at music. Just a real pile of ass with no rhythm. You'd have better luck putting a synthesizer in front of a leaf on a windy day. I can't do anything musically. With that being said, music is really important to me, emotionally, and it's something that I am listening to during 90% of my free time. I listen to a ton of genres and hang out with a musical crowd, we share music with each other, but I personally can't play any instrument. I've never even taken a course in music.

Fuser is like magical. The beat-matching stuff they have going on in the background makes putting together sets that sound incredible such an easy task. That's not to say it's automatic, you can really put together a nightmare, but it does a great job of easing you in to terms and explaining use-cases for you, and the campaign's audience request functionality is a pretty effective way to encourage mixing and matching genres and styles. Finding a way to match up Here Comes Your Man with Soulja Boy and Rockafeller Skank, and then layering effects over that, in incredibly intuitive. I've bought and played with many gameified music creation tools but there was never a solid hook or base of knowledge to allow me to properly express myself.

If you enjoy music, and you want to create it in a pressure-free environment, it's worth it, 100%. Of course, it's different for everyone and I enjoy it as a more self-directed experience as opposed to performative, but I devoured campaign and love messing around in the free performance mode. It bridges the gap between the purely gameplay-driven experience of a Guitar Hero and the edutainment angle of something like Rocksmith. It's made me want to explore creating music in a way that I didn't know I actually wanted to do. I am loving the hell out of it.

@the_nubster: that was an awesome response. Thank you for sharing all that! Really giving me something to mull over.

2 more questions for ya.

How long did the campaign end up taking you?

Did the campaign leave you feeling fairly competent with all the extra features that you can lay on top of the music?

The real benefit of Fuser is that it doesn't require you to consider anything you didn't learn during the tutorial campaign. It has great beat matching to take away all the technical stress, won't really give you advice on How To Be Good At This In Real Life, and the flaws in the game related to mixing are only going to massively frustrate people who already know the capabilities of full on production suite hardware & software.

While the above paragraph can be read as criticism, as a video game, it's grand if there's enough music on there that you like. If there's not then wait to see how the DLC looks in a few months time. That's the important bit, you need songs and loops you want to create with. There's no guarantees what songs will be DLC right now so holding off may be wise if you don't care about what's already in the game.

Also, if you get the choice of playing on a platform with mouse support, do that. It's much easier.

I've had fun with the game despite disliking most of the songs on there, but I compose, toy with samples a lot, record and play a fair few instruments so, to repeat something Jeff G said, it didn't seem worth the time compared to actually creating something in a much deeper bit of software where you have a great deal of control after years of learning. I know it's anecdotal, but I think it speaks to Fuser being something for people who aren't already familiar with creating music in some way, shape, or form. And that's great!

@mightyduck: The campaign ran me about 5-7 hours I'd guess, I also left the game idling a fair bit during. It does a very solid job at introducing you to all of the mechanics available to you beyond the basic action of swapping discs in and out, and the bonus objectives during each set that you play reinforce those mechanics as well. It can be as simple as asking you to lay down a synth track, to asking you to include 3 bass tracks, have one R&B track, and to play a low-pass filter on one of the bass tracks. When I got into the freestyle mode, I felt pretty confident about what all of the mechanics did and how to use them, and from there it was a matter of getting fully familiar with them outside of the context of scoring points in the campaign. The technology in the background takes care of the nitty-gritty, but it does let you mess with the key and the BPM to suit the mood. To play good sets, the game really just asks that you can keep track of 32 beats in 4/4 time. Like @osail said, it's really amazing for me as someone who has zero experience creating music, but what it is doing is stoking a fire in me to want to learn how to do this. As it stands, it's a really simple-to-use tool that captures the feeling and the emotion of the music without requiring dozens or hundreds of hours of investment.

I'm also not a musician myself at all but I'm really having a good time. I have a similar love for mashups, DJ Hero was one of my favourite games on 360 and this is really scratching that itch in a way I didn't know I even wanted. It really does feel like magic when you're in a flow state and bangin' out mixes. It has very strong "Hey, come and check this out" energy that'll impress almost anyone who watches for a few minutes.

I got it on PC and the campaign too me about 7-8ish hrs. It has 6 DJ stages (worlds?) which each contain about 6 sets (levels?) within them which they gradually unlock features/tools and do a good job teaching you how to use them with context. That said, even as a non-musician the campaign felt like it was moving a tad slow for me. IMO its length could be cut by 1/3 and going for score by filling audience requests kinda felt disruptive to my own sense of flow when I felt I had a really good mix going.

After the campaign there's still quite a few songs and cosmetic to unlock but it's not worth the money if your the type that's primarily motivated by a meaty or involved campaign. However as a vehicle to enjoy music, mashups and just have fun with the right support it could be a real evergreen game. After buying the full game and 4-5 dlc songs I don't regret it at all.

I'm really enjoying it. I've put in about 12 hours so far, about half of that going through the campaign and half just noodling in freestyle mode.

Like DropMix before it, this is an extremely cool music toy in search of a game. The campaign is very much just a tutorial and the competitive battle mode totally misses the mark, but going into freestyle mode and just vibing is where Fuser shines. It captures that magic of creating and improvising without requiring you to have a deep knowledge of music theory to make it work.

That said, as much as I like Fuser, I can't deny that the entry price does feel a little steep regardless of how much the music licensing may necessitate it. I'm also a little concerned about the longterm prospects for this game - it's going to need a steady stream of new content to keep it going but I'm not sure if the audience is going to be big enough for Harmonix to justify it.

I just got the game a few days ago on the Epic Games store sale they have going on for the VIP edition. So far I am about 2/3 through the campaign and haven't done much else with the game, but I'm enjoying it a lot. The weekly events seem like an interesting way to keep the game engaging and music passes will help to some extent. If you're able to get it on sale it might be worth it.

@streetninja: Thanks for the heads up! I noticed that today in regards to the sale. The weekly events are what seem like a draw to me. Sounds kind of neat being able to put your mix out to the community and see how it goes.