After being absent for a year, Insomniac’s first multiplatform game has surfaced again but it’s now under a new game and possibly a different art style as well. After capturing the attention of gamers at E3 2011, Overstrike from Insomniac Games looked like it would be a fun co-op centric game that played up the strengths of the studio (crazy weapon design + blowing stuff up), but then it vanished. Believed to be a possible victim of the EA Partners program, gamers wondered if Overstrike would ever return and now such a thing has happened.
Teased during Ted Price’s presentation at PAX Prime this past weekend, Overstrike is indeed coming back but now it won’t be called Overstrike. Now dubbed Fuse, one teaser image of the project was reveled in advance of its soon to be reveal on September 12th. Yes, there’s actually a countdown for a Fuse reveal as the website for the game is slowly counting down to that date. That’s the wonder of video game marketing - a game can go away, reappear with a different name and be supported with a countdown clock to add hype for the 10 people who still remember it.
Ted Price didn’t reveal any additional details about Fuse or what Insomniac was doing with the project, but the screenshot revealed is rather telling. Besides from reiterating that the de facto baddie in the game will be killer robots, Fuse looks a bit more mature compared to what Overstrike originally depicted. It may be hard to tell a lot from one mere image taken out of context, but things don’t seem to feature the same pronounced style as the CG debut trailer. So either the game has gone through some major revisions or Insomniac just chose the worst possible screen to depict the game.
Insomniac will likely deliver some artistic magic as they always do, but outside from highlighting an enemy that looks like a robo Helghast/Chimera hybrid, the general fear amongst gamers is that Overstrike may have been retooled too much into what could be yet another generic shooter. Of course it’s still too early to tell at this stage and the game could follow in the same steps as Binary Domain by having a generic debut only to blow our minds once we finally played it.
More details on Fuse will likely come once September 12th rolls around so for now we can do nothing but sit patiently and hope that Insomniac will once again deliver the same action packed and original experiences like they always do.
The E3 2011 debut trailer for Overstrike
