Developer: Microsoft Game Studios
Publisher: Microsoft
Genre: Party!
Rating: E for Everyone
Number of Players: Probably a bunch
Platforms: Xbox 360

Every week I plan on reviewing the lowest of the low, the bottom of the barrel and the most eye-gougingly bad games around. Why? So you don’t have to. I’m risking life, limb, and sanity for your entertainment, so enjoy!

Where to start? The Wii’s third party line up is full of craptackular titles looking to wear at my mind, but I decided to start with a game some new 360 owners might have had the unfortunate chance of picking up: Fuzion Frenzy 2.

Fuzion Frenzy 2 is the sequel to the Xbox’s Fuzion Frenz, a party game filled with a number of mini-games, which wasn’t too highly regarded. I didn’t know of anyone who had played the original, much less the unexpected sequel. Whoever decided to milk the last drops for this series needs to be shot, because this is one of the worst games I have ever came across.

It's like an acid trip... except you wasted your money on a game instead...

This game has to have been some sort of afterthought, right? Who could have put this out with so much wrong with it, so much crap and lack of anything resembling “finished”? Somebody please tell me that someone didn’t seriously think this would be a good game, or even a good idea in concept… If that’s the way some of these developers are thinking, we’ll keep seeing crap like this churned out monthly, which is just plain bad for everyone that fancies themselves a gamer. Way to go (DEV), your studio has now been labeled a crap factory, for the love of Mario, make something good.

The exceptionally weak story follows a host of a TV show, and the contestants as they battle across a number of planets playing mini-games specific, and stylized, to each of the planets. The ice planet has mini-games revolving around ice and so on.

So, the first noticeably bad thing in Fuzion Frenzy 2 is the character design. Each of the playable characters looks like a reject from a failed anime or some over the top character that’s been dropped on their head one too many times. The announcer/host of this reality show from hell is another anime reject, with the spikiest multicolored hair of them all. He’s got some sort of imaging rig on his shoulders that does nothing; it looks more like a butane torch than anything else. For some reason, he calls himself a DJ… Disk Jokey, even though he’s the host of the TV show, IE a Video Jokey… Come on now writers, that’s beyond bad nowadays, that’s just common knowledge. That leads to the next major problem with the game, voice acting.

Pure and simple, the voices don’t match up. It’s worse than a terribly dubbed Godzilla movie. The animations don’t even come close to the spoken words. This dubbing makes those old Godzilla movies seem like perfect English.  The animation and dubbing are just horrendous. Making this even worse are the extremely annoying voices for each character. They’re each grating and painful to the ears… Made even worse by the constant replaying of the same sound bites they’ve got about three sound bites for each character, and a handful more for the “DJ,” they’re quick and terse, and usually poor attempts at humor or claiming superiority. The announcer’s sound bites happen most often when in the mini-games, when someone gets shot or whatnot, which can be a lot in many of them. He also constantly asks how the playing in last place is feeling; how the hell are they supposed to feel?

The mainstay of the game is the mini games. Long story short, they’re terrible. Many are beyond broken with no semblance of strategy, or any form of skill to play any of them. Many are just dumb luck, or are so buggy that it’s impossible to beat the computer. Speaking of the computer, it’s cheap as hell. This damn thing cheats like none other. I had it on easy, and I was still getting my ass handed to me in the most mundane of mini games. Why? Because they were so buggy that I couldn’t perform whatever they wanted to correctly, and the computer could.

The mini games ranged from the standard beat ‘em up, to button masher, to racing, to amoeba hunting. Whoever thought tossing small bombs at amoebas  would be a good idea was mistaken. Sure, it sounds fun in concept, but they didn’t pull it off and instead, made it into a gigantic pain in the ass. The button mashing games were probably the easiest to win, considering you didn’t have to maneuver with the terrible camera or avoid the other players, it was just me and the controller. The NPC’s were still pretty cheap in this too, they moved incredibly fast for being on easy, and I only assume that they’d be impossible to beat on a harder difficulty.

Wtf is going on right now...

Another part that made the game rather cheap were the ‘cards’ used at the end of mini games. Apparently they thought this would add strategy to the game, by letting people get two, three or even six times the score in one match. The announcer would toss these cards to players or there would be a ‘mini game’, and I use that term loosely, where you ran to a card on the floor… that’s it. Takes about three seconds, and one person doesn’t get a card. Somehow, the computer knew which cards were real (they put down one fake card, and three normal ones, you can’t tell which are which) and would always get them, and they’d always be some ridiculous multiplier. This would lead to them getting a nearly untouchable score at each planet, letting them win easily.

So, are there any redeeming qualities in this game? The only thing good about it that I could find, besides making fun of it, was the presence of some decently easy achievements. So, if you’re looking for an easy 1000 points go for it!  But I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone who wants to have fun, so just take my advice and don’t play this game. Your sanity will thank me later.