Funko Fusion Review

What if you made a LEGO game, but replaced all of the minifigs with Funko Pops? You’d get Funko Fusion, but that’s not too much of a surprise since the team behind the game, 10:10 Games, is made up of a number of Traveller’s Tales alums who spent years making the LEGO games we all know and love. So, does the move from bricks to big heads work? Well, somewhat, but not as much as I would have hoped…

First let’s start with the story. The game opens with the face of Funko Pops, Freddy Funko, working away at the Funko factory (try not to think too much about the implications of a universe in which Pops are manufactured by Pops). The production of vinyl collectibles soon comes to a halt when Freddy’s brother Eddy arrives on the scene. Jealous of Freddy’s power, Eddy steals his crown and uses its power to infect all the pop culture worlds that serve as inspiration for Pop figures. You’ll need to visit those worlds, set them right, find the crowns hidden within, and then use all those crowns to defeat Eddy. If you think that all of that doesn’t make a lot of sense, you are completely right. What makes Freddy so magic beyond a knack for industrial production and a savvy sense of marketing is a mystery, which isn’t too surprising for a character that’s basically served as a corporate mascot for a company that’s never bothered to give him a backstory in the first place. And your journey through the game’s worlds will have you fighting the same adversaries that the characters in the original stories had to face, so it’s not really clear how their lives have actually changed as a result of Eddy’s interference. And so on, and so on. I think that since the LEGO games took their stories from movie and comic plotlines, the developers never really had to work to create a narrative from scratch. Faced with a blank slate, they’ve come up with a threadbare excuse to send you off into the game that was probably created in a committee meeting with Funko corporate executives. Just play through the game to see the Funk Pop recreations of the worlds of franchises such as The Umbrella Academy and Scott Pilgrim Against the World and don’t bother to think about anything else.

The gameplay cycle will seem relatively familiar to anyone who’s played a LEGO game before. There’s a central hub, in this case the Funko Pop Factory, from which you enter the game’s various worlds. Since there’s no cohesive narrative, you’re pretty much free to decide which order you want to tackle them in. Your first time through a world you’ll play using characters drawn from that world – choose The Umbrella Academy and you’ll play as Alison, Diego, Klaus, and Five. Each character has a ranged and melee attack, but some have an additional power that will be necessary to get past a type of obstacle or advance the world’s story. Special stations in the levels allow you to swap between the world’s characters, so you don’t have to worry about starting out with your favorite only to find that they don’t have the power that you need to complete the level. However, there will be objects that you won’t be able to interact with or secrets that can’t be uncovered because they require a power that your characters don’t possess. Like the LEGO games, Funko Fusion is designed for you to return to previously played levels with characters that you unlock later in the game in other worlds who will have powers not currently available to you. The game doesn’t give you any guidance as to what special powers you’ll need later, though. You’re left on your own to discover them and to remember where you encountered these objects in the past when you discover how to unlock them.

Funko Fusion differs from the LEGO model in that rather than leading you through a series of set piece levels it opens things up into full 3D, almost open-world levels. There’s a lot of fan service in the game, and fans of each franchise will really enjoy seeing all of the references the game manages to pack into its levels. There are plenty of hidden items and areas to find if you explore your surroundings, including a number of smaller hidden worlds all of which are based on licensed franchises. You have to give the game credit for ensuring that the levels are a joy for fans to explore and not just doing the bare minimum to service each licensed franchise.

Unfortunately, for all of the work that went into the game’s levels, the gameplay could have used more attention. The action relies heavily on shooting, but the shooter mechanics are clunky. The lack of precision can be compensated for during battles by constant circle strafing, but unfortunately there are a number of puzzles that rely on hitting a sequence of targets within a tight time limit. These puzzles are exercises in frustration as you struggle to get the aiming cursor to stop on a point.

There’s also a problem with the game’s head-scratching design decision to give you a limited number of lives to complete a level. It’s incredibly frustrating to spend an evening getting most of the way through a level only to lose your last life near the end and discover that your only choice is to replay the entire level from the beginning again.

Probably the biggest issue with the game is the disheartening number of game-breaking bugs you’ll encounter. Characters you need to progress through a level can become stuck, fail to perform a necessary action, or not show up at all. I wasted a lot of time with the game trying to figure out what to do next when the problem was that I couldn’t do anything because of a glitch. The only remedy each time this happened was to abandon the level and start it all over again from the beginning, hoping that the next time through the level wouldn’t glitch.

I really wanted to enjoy this game. I collect Funko Pops and love many of the franchises represented in the game, and fully expected an experience at the same level of quality as the LEGO games. I’m also surprised that given the popularity of the Pop Yourself custom figures, the game doesn’t have any kind of character-building feature. Unfortunately, I can’t really recommend this game, you’ll probably find it as frustrating and disappointing as I did.