Funko Fusion

I was very excited to jump into Funko Fusion from 10:10 Games, a fledgling studio made up of many folks that worked on the original LEGO games at Traveler’s Tales. The description of Funko Fusion rang my geek bell loudly and clearly, a mash-up romp through many beloved film and television franchises – many of them from Universal Studios, which seems to be the main partner here. I don’t have strong feelings about Funko toys (though I own about 20 of them, because how can you not?), but I was captured by the idea of playing through a game made up of these disparate properties. Basically, I would happily take the Funko if I could have the Jaws in return.

But in practice, I found Funko Fusion to feel like an act of trickery, something that initially felt like a near miss, but actually became a source of sadness that teased me by dangling fun just out of reach as it sank ever so slowly into a grim march through a gaming morass.

Before I get into all of the things that I don’t like about Funko Fusion, let me get this out of the way: I love that Funko Fusion exists. I am completely agog at the fact that, in the year of our lord 2024, someone took the time to make a video game with five levels of content based on the 2007 action-comedy Hot Fuzz. There is now a video game based on The Umbrella Academy. And, if you play your cards right, you can run around the Battlestar Galactica as He-Man. There is so much to love about this game, conceptually.

But accessing the content you want is another matter entirely. As it stands right now, it feels like Funko Fusion could have used a bit more time in the ol’ tutorial cooker, because I spent the first several hours of this game absolutely bewildered at what I was doing, what I was supposed to be doing, and how the game wanted me to do those things.

Funko Fusion loads you immediately into an interface that allows you to choose a character from any of its seven primary worlds (the aforementioned wonderful Hot Fuzz, the equally wonderful The Thing, Jurassic World, Battlestar Galactica, The Umbrella Academy, Masters of the Universe, and Scott Pilgrim – no real losers here). No matter what you select, you are treated to the same opening sequence in the game’s hub, in which some evil vinyl Funko Pop dude murders a Funko Fox (don’t ask me) and kinda hurts his good Funko counterpart, then goes disappearing off into the Funko wilds. This was the beginning of my bewilderment, because I had no freaking idea what was going on, why it was happening, or how it related to any of the rest of the game.

After this, you are free to pursue the action in the world you have chosen. I picked Hot Fuzz, so when the stuff in the hub started, I was like “What the crap does this have to do with Hot Fuzz?”. Then when the actual Hot Fuzz levels started, I was like “Ooohh…I see. That was just some nonsense to set the stage.” The actual Hot Fuzz levels are kinda fun, if a bit mystifying to run through.

Each “world” in the game consists of five or six levels. The player can choose one of four characters in each level and run through a series of tasks. Finish one off, and you are rewarded with a gold crown and can move onto the next level. Finish a world, and you are rewarded with extra characters from that world and can re-enter it with any other characters you’ve unlocked to solve and leftover mysteries and unravel the game’s many puzzles.

Most of these mysteries and puzzles involve earning more crowns (kinda the point of the game, though the game never explicitly tells you that), or opening up portals to “Cameo Quests” or “Cameo Levels”. These are additional characters or small one-level worlds that exist outside of the main worlds, but can only be accessed by bringing characters from outside the world you are currently in.

Okay, I’ve lost you. This is not surprising. Let me use an example. In the Hot Fuzz world, you can access a level from Jaws. It is behind a locked door in a little shack on the main drag in the level’s downtown. But you can only open the door with one character that has flame abilities and one character that has electric abilities. None of the characters in Hot Fuzz has either of these abilities, so you have to keep playing the game, then come back later with characters from other franchises. The game communicates this to the player through a series of signs and icons near the door, none of which are explained in any way, shape or form. So the first time you encounter the Jaws door (if you haven’t read this review), you just kinda hang out near it, looking around aimlessly, trying to figure out what you need to do to unlock it. Is there a puzzle to solve? Some widget to interact with? Do you need to shoot something? Eventually you just give up and wander away.

And that’s how pretty much every mechanic in the game works. You experience it. You fiddle around. You can’t figure it out. You move on. It eventually dawns on you what you need to do. You spend hours and hours of time going back through levels you’ve already defeated, multiple times with multiple characters, to unlock even more characters with different abilities, so you can take those characters into other levels you’ve already beaten, so you can unlock more characters. And oh my God, I want to die.

What do the different color chests contain? Fiddle around! Figure it out! What do the different color vinyl production machines do? Fiddle around! Figure it out! What do the weird recycling machines do? Well, I figured out by fiddling around that you throw used cans into them, but I’m still not certain what effect that has. I need to fiddle around more.

I should also mention that many of these characters feel very, very interchangeable. For example, in The Thing level, all of the guys have guns that enable the level’s far-too-excessive combat. One of them is on roller-skates, and one of them has a flamethrower, but you really don’t need either of those things, so I just picked one and stuck with them for the duration. Sure, The Umbrella Academy students have interesting powers, but the Hot Fuzz cops? Well…not so much. Cop uniforms and guns.

Speaking of guns, the game’s combat is simultaneously boring and frustrating. Enemies either linger incessantly in certain areas or are randomly spawned in huge swarms at certain story points. The game sometimes asks you to eliminate a certain number, but the counter is very buggy, and sometimes dudes spawn inside of objects or get stuck somewhere, leaving you wandering around to find that one last dude to advance the story. The player can either shoot the baddies or melee them, but good luck if there are more than four or five around. They will take you down like piranha, and the game loves spawning them both behind you and in front of you. And don't get me started on the boss fights, which are nigh incomprehensible. 

There is very little dialogue in the game to distinguish the characters from each other, and the dialogue that is there is in the form of comic bubbles. This has the effect of rendering the humor or tension of the original properties completely inert. The game manages to reproduce the look and characters of each franchise, but the ineffable spirit of these worlds seems to have gotten lost in the transition to digital vinyl. What you end up with here is a game with a ton of content – this is a very sizable game, particularly when you consider all the backtracking – based on things you love, that never feels fun or accessible. You know that whole thing about sitting on a donkey’s back and dangling a carrot in front of it to get it to march endlessly forward? That’s what I felt like in Funko Fusion – a trudging donkey, forever chasing the unattainable carrot of fun.

The most emotion this game could get out of me by the end was the occasional eyebrow twitch of recognition. When it was over, I was left pondering the nature of my own fandom, and wondering whether these properties really had any meaning in my life. Funko Fusion made me question my own sense of nostalgia for things that were not made specifically for me and had me wondering why I bother loving things that can never love me back. The end result felt akin to a minor existential crisis. I’m fairly certain that was not the reaction the creators were aiming for.