Not really worth full price, like at all. Roughly after just over 40 minutes gameplay, I've played through about half of the campaign (which truthfully, is more like an elongated tutorial than anything else) and while the gameplay itself is solid, fun, and satisfying, the appeal of it quickly runs out and unlike prior Harmonix titles (namely Rock Band and Dance Central) it doesn't feel like there's a high skill ceiling to keep striving for, which is what games like this live and die by. I admit, I haven't played to it's completion and from what I can gather, in the later stages it does seem to introduce more complex features to the mix, but I can't imagine a lot of it doesn't just end up hinging on just dropping discs on beat. The music itself - as a whole, a very healthy set of different genres and music is subjective anyways, so quality is in the eyes of the beholder on that, and in spite of there being so much representation it all melds very well, and chances are if you are like me, you'll wind up buying the VIP edition so you can stick "Crank That" and "Bring Me To Life" on everything, alongside just filling up your library in general. In-game mixes sound great for the most part, some hiccups with BPMs dropping significantly due to one or two discs in the mix, which becomes especially notable when the vocal track starts sounding like that one Macintosh Plus song, but if I'm honest, the novelty ran it's course fast and there was nothing gripping about the gameplay aside from fulfilling crowd requests to keep me engaged. It's a game that could definitely be a lot of fun in doses, but for the full price, it's not worth it, and it's especially not worth it for the additional launch pack.

A couple of notes since I initially wrote this review:

1. As commenters have pointed out - no, I was not halfway through the campaign at the time of review, rather about halfway through the first set of levels/sets/stages/whatever you wanna call them, which does render the first couple of sentences a bit misleading.

2. After spending some time looking over "higher level" gameplay, I still fundamentally think the game is lacking in terms of sense of progression and especially in terms of difficulty. A lot of the reason why a game like Guitar Hero remains prevalent to this day does come down to the nature of being easy to pickup, hard to master, and the skill ceiling for it is damn near limitless.

3. In spite of this, I'm well aware Fuser aims for something completely different and much more casual. That's fine, and I've even said that on a baseline level the gameplay is very fun and satisfying, but my issue really lies with it just not being a game that I could see playing, learning the mechanics of in-depth, and achieving great feats for long periods of time with. It is very much a game that is designed more for 30 minute freestyle sessions than 3 hour grindfests. Seriously, make no mistake, that's not a bad thing, but the price isn't really that justifiable for what you really get.

4. I have since refunded the game - and I'm going to be honest with you, I might wind up rebuying it during a sale in the future. It is a good game fundamentally, the price is just complete overkill and if you are like me, been playing rhythm games for most of your life, and play most of them on the higher difficulty levels, you will be disappointed by Fuser. It is a very different rhythm game in many respects, but it's one I don't see maintaining relevance for years to come.

EDIT 10/31/2023:
So now nearly 3 years departed from launch, this game is delisted, and has been for nearly a year actually. I was not planning on adding more to this review but y'know with Steam nagging me to update my thoughts every time I launch the game again I figure I'd go ahead and add a postmortem of sorts to this review. Fuser is one of the biggest colossal failures I've ever seen, commercially that is. I'm not going to pretend like I don't think it was deserving of it with those paragraphs above, but it is still bittersweet because while it lacks in difficulty or like I keep pointing to, limitless skill ceiling, the way Fuser manipulates song stems is unbelievable and, I think, the game as it was at launch, or even as it was before it was delisted, never explored that to it's fullest extent. So enter current year and the game is effectively abandonware and honestly, thriving way more in it's afterlife. This is almost entirely due to the community that believed in this game and has given it a new life of it's own through mods and customs. While it's still very much a casual game and something that I usually pop on for about a hour to just play around with stems and stream to my friends, it is phenomenal what you can do with this game now thanks to customs. I still wish there was more challenging content, I thought it would be really cool if there was a freestyle play mode where the crowd constantly shouted out requests or you were given tasks or something like that, because replaying the campaign missions suck almost entirely because of how it doesn't really have a free flow and makes sure you use specific songs every single time, but the ship has sailed on that being added so whatever. If you have this game already and I know a fair few people do because you got real angry at me in the comments on this review, definitely come back to it and check out what the community's been doing with the game. Song selection really was the biggest highlight of this game and having that expanded as substantially as it has been really elevated this game over the moon.

Not really worth full price, like at all. Roughly after just over 40 minutes gameplay, I've played through about half of the campaign (which truthfully, is more like an elongated tutorial than anything else) and while the gameplay itself is solid, fun, and satisfying, the appeal of it quickly runs out and unlike prior Harmonix titles (namely Rock Band and Dance Central) it doesn't feel like there's a high skill ceiling to keep striving for, which is what games like this live and die by. I admit, I haven't played to it's completion and from what I can gather, in the later stages it does seem to introduce more complex features to the mix, but I can't imagine a lot of it doesn't just end up hinging on just dropping discs on beat. The music itself - as a whole, a very healthy set of different genres and music is subjective anyways, so quality is in the eyes of the beholder on that, and in spite of there being so much representation it all melds very well, and chances are if you are like me, you'll wind up buying the VIP edition so you can stick "Crank That" and "Bring Me To Life" on everything, alongside just filling up your library in general. In-game mixes sound great for the most part, some hiccups with BPMs dropping significantly due to one or two discs in the mix, which becomes especially notable when the vocal track starts sounding like that one Macintosh Plus song, but if I'm honest, the novelty ran it's course fast and there was nothing gripping about the gameplay aside from fulfilling crowd requests to keep me engaged. It's a game that could definitely be a lot of fun in doses, but for the full price, it's not worth it, and it's especially not worth it for the additional launch pack. A couple of notes since I initially wrote this review: 1. As commenters have pointed out - no, I was not halfway through the campaign at the time of review, rather about halfway through the first set of levels/sets/stages/whatever you wanna call them, which does render the first couple of sentences a bit misleading. 2. After spending some time looking over "higher level" gameplay, I still fundamentally think the game is lacking in terms of sense of progression and especially in terms of difficulty. A lot of the reason why a game like Guitar Hero remains prevalent to this day does come down to the nature of being easy to pickup, hard to master, and the skill ceiling for it is damn near limitless. 3. In spite of this, I'm well aware Fuser aims for something completely different and much more casual. That's fine, and I've even said that on a baseline level the gameplay is very fun and satisfying, but my issue really lies with it just not being a game that I could see playing, learning the mechanics of in-depth, and achieving great feats for long periods of time with. It is very much a game that is designed more for 30 minute freestyle sessions than 3 hour grindfests. Seriously, make no mistake, that's not a bad thing, but the price isn't really that justifiable for what you really get. 4. I have since refunded the game - and I'm going to be honest with you, I might wind up rebuying it during a sale in the future. It is a good game fundamentally, the price is just complete overkill and if you are like me, been playing rhythm games for most of your life, and play most of them on the higher difficulty levels, you will be disappointed by Fuser. It is a very different rhythm game in many respects, but it's one I don't see maintaining relevance for years to come. EDIT 10/31/2023: So now nearly 3 years departed from launch, this game is delisted, and has been for nearly a year actually. I was not planning on adding more to this review but y'know with Steam nagging me to update my thoughts every time I launch the game again I figure I'd go ahead and add a postmortem of sorts to this review. Fuser is one of the biggest colossal failures I've ever seen, commercially that is. I'm not going to pretend like I don't think it was deserving of it with those paragraphs above, but it is still bittersweet because while it lacks in difficulty or like I keep pointing to, limitless skill ceiling, the way Fuser manipulates song stems is unbelievable and, I think, the game as it was at launch, or even as it was before it was delisted, never explored that to it's fullest extent. So enter current year and the game is effectively abandonware and honestly, thriving way more in it's afterlife. This is almost entirely due to the community that believed in this game and has given it a new life of it's own through mods and customs. While it's still very much a casual game and something that I usually pop on for about a hour to just play around with stems and stream to my friends, it is phenomenal what you can do with this game now thanks to customs. I still wish there was more challenging content, I thought it would be really cool if there was a freestyle play mode where the crowd constantly shouted out requests or you were given tasks or something like that, because replaying the campaign missions suck almost entirely because of how it doesn't really have a free flow and makes sure you use specific songs every single time, but the ship has sailed on that being added so whatever. If you have this game already and I know a fair few people do because you got real angry at me in the comments on this review, definitely come back to it and check out what the community's been doing with the game. Song selection really was the biggest highlight of this game and having that expanded as substantially as it has been really elevated this game over the moon.