Touted as the Spiritual Successor of the aforementioned game series, Formula Fusion puts the player into FXWAR racing league, piloting customizable anti-gravity crafts and taking advantage of pick-up pads on the track to gain victory.
The game underwent a Kickstarter campaign in April 2015, entered Steam Early Access program and finally released on PC in 1st June 2017, with plans for PlayStation4 and XboxONE and Mac OSX in the future.
In early 2019, the game was renamed to Pacer and was given a date for a large-scale update on October 29th, 2020.
The game contains example of:
- Animesque: Like WipEout before it, this game features Japanese-inspired visual designs for some of the fictional brands, courtesy of the Designers Republic.
- Artificial Stupidity: The AI is pretty bad in regards to turning on corners, especially tight, twisty-turny ones at high speeds. Special mention should go to the Beast in the Grand Finale tournament, who constantly crashes and burns on the very technical Trans Atol courses.
- Big Applesauce: Mannahatta, which is set in New York.
- Blood Sport: Well, obviously.
- Cave Behind the Falls: One section of Niagara has you racing in a tunnel behind the titular falls.
- Character Customization: Formula Fusion does this via Cards system that modifies the statistic points the AG crafts have. It will also affect what weapons they have and what they do.
- There's also skin customization where you can change your craft's skin, trail and exhaust colour.
- And now you can slap on spoilers and bonnet scoops to your ride, amongst others in recent updates
- Cherry Tapping: It's possible to nudge your opponents to death if they have low health left. Doing so even earns you an achievement for it!
- City Noir: Again, Mannahatta.
- Competitive Balance: Each of the five ships falls into the following categories:
- Jack of All Stats: Vixen, Dragon (though with an emphasis on airbrake control).
- Fragile Speedster: Sabre (focused on handling), Voxel (focused on speed).
- Stone Wall: Python.
- Computer Voice: Mainly when enemy weapons are being used and when taking damage.
- Critical Existence Failure: As long as your craft has some shield left, you can still race.
- Cyberpunk with a Chance of Rain: Once again, Mannahatta.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Due to the radical changes to pick-up system, players from WipEout series can find themselves accidentally firing off their Boost instead of their weapons.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Unlike in WipEout, getting eliminated in a race isn't an automatic loss. You'll instead lose some time and your current position, which can be gained back easily. This doesn't apply in endurance mode however.
- Deflector Shields: The Tank utility pickup.
- Difficulty Levels: Like WipEout, there are five speed classes, in order of increasing speed:
- Down the Drain: Near the end of Niagara you go through what appears to be a sewer/water treatment plant.
- Eagleland: The main setting of the game. Also applies to the Trans-Am Yangs team.
- "Instant Death" Radius: The shockwave weapon, albeit not quite as overpowered as the repulsor was in WipEout.
- Invisibility Cloak: Available as a selectable weapon to keep homing missiles from locking onto you.
- It's All Upstairs From Here: Somewhat inverted with Atlas Torres, a tower in Seattle, which has you first go up a vertical slope to the top before descending down to the finish. Played straight in the reverse version though.
- Level in Reverse: In both flipped path and flipped level variants (the latter was added in a later update).
- Life Drain: Possible to customize your weapons to act like this.
- MegaCorp: Plenty of them in this game, just like WipEout before it.
- Mercy Mode: Included as a card for handling. Useful for newbies and absurdly fast speeds, not so much for maintaining optimal race lines.
- Multinational Team: A good few teams happen to be made up of several countries. For instance, Transam Yangs consists of the USA, Canada and Mexico, while Midas AG is made up of many European countries, just like FEISAR before them.
- Nitro Boost: The game feature a self-charging Boost system which can be used anytime. But by default the gauge refills slowly; passing over speed-pads fills this much, much faster.
- Ruins of the Modern Age: Seems to be the case on some tracks like Niagara and Midtown Trafik. Background lore reveals this to be due to them getting struck by a flood and virus outbreak respectively.
- Smart Bomb: It's possible to customize the mine weapon to act like this.
- South of the Border: El Muro is located in a shanty town near the border between the USA and Mexico.
- Vehicular Combat: Yep.
- Wacky Racing: Obviously.
