Funko Fusion is a mess, combining mature franchises with dull and uninteresting gameplay. It takes the styling of a LEGO game, mixing in blood and violence to baffling results. It isn’t particularly fun to play and it doesn’t really present these movies it’s based on in a way that’s anywhere near as compelling as the movies themselves.
Funko Fusion
Developer: 1010 Games
Price: $50
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S (reviewed), PC, PS4 and Nintendo Switch at a later date
Xbox Series X|S code provided for review
Funko Fusion attempts to strike a delicate balance between a collection of mature franchises and a simple puzzle game, like classic LEGO titles like LEGO Star Wars. It rarely succeeds in this attempt and even the few moments where it only feels like success compared to the rest of the game. The tone is bizarre in most places and the gameplay doesn’t offer any depth or fun, creating a strange mashup of franchises that have very little to do with each other.
I believe that I fall into the target audience for Funko Fusion. I am an adult who has played and beaten many LEGO games in the past because I find the simplistic gameplay relaxing and fun in many cases. That said, it doesn’t succeed on the gameplay front and it certainly doesn’t succeed when it comes to its included franchises or tone. This game is too violent for children, and I can’t imagine many kids caring about Hot Fuzz, The Thing, or M3GAN anyway, but the simplistic gameplay and bad third-person shooting were trite to start the game.
To start with the tone, each of the main world is consistent on a few levels going through the plot of that movie. You can choose where to start. I went with Hot Fuzz, but the main worlds include franchises like Scott Pilgrim, Battlestar Galactica, The Thing, Umbrella Academy, and Jurassic World. Hot Fuzz starts with you trying to solve the violent murders from the movie, which immediately showcases the problem. The cutscenes follow the silent slapstick style of classic LEGO games, but when people are murdered here is gory. The one that stuck out the most was the statue falling off the church and exploding a Funko person’s head, causing a large blood splatter.
I don’t think the strange violence is a problem by itself, but the gameplay is incredibly simple. You fight enemy Funkos using basic melee attacks or by shooting them. The melee attacks are basic, with limited moves outside of a charge attack, and the third-person shooting is as rudimentary as possible. Every character has a different weapon, but none of them feel different outside of the fire rate. Shooting makes up a large chunk of gameplay, so its mindlessness and mediocre feeling drag the entire experience down.
The puzzles aren’t really that interesting either. Each main world has a special tool you unlock at the start, which is used to complete the majority of puzzles. In Hot Fuzz it’s a crime scene camera, which you have to point at different spots in a crime scene to reveal evidence. It’s less interesting than it sounds since you don’t actually solve anything here, instead moving the camera until the controller vibrates, repeating until you find all of them, and the puzzle is considered solved. Unfortunately, that’s one of the more interesting tools too, with The Thing offering a simple explosive gas canister for creating fire, which feels incredibly dumb considering one of the characters from The Thing has a flamethrower by default.
The rest of the level consists of bonus crowns and cameo levels you can find, some locked behind tools you will get from other worlds, and others behind the same set of puzzles. Every level has one for finding a breaking a different collectible, one for fighting waves of enemies, and another for finding four levers and pulling them within a certain amount of time. There is almost no variance from level to level on these, adding to the repetitiveness. There are also collectibles to be found in each level, like Amber from Jurassic World, a KFC branded chicken bucket, and the flesh and bones of your Fox friend, who had their skin ripped off in the opening level.
It’s clear that these missions are designed for you to take a second run through after beating the game, using all of the tools to clean up the rest of the puzzles, but after trying one, it was clear to me that there was no joy to be found in cleaning up the rest of these puzzles. Some of the cameos are a little interesting just because of the wide range of franchises represented, but many of them were clearly tedious. I found M3GAN in a The Thing level, where I had to do a tedious extended fight against her, at which point she left saying I needed to find her elsewhere and do that boring fight again, which killed any amusement I got from seeing the weird robot child in this game.
The story revolves around an evil Freddy Funko, named Eddy, stealing crowns and poisoning different worlds, but there isn’t much to latch onto here. Funko Fusion also has its fair share of bugs, but to be frank, the experience wasn’t good enough when everything was working for me to care.
Funko Fusion seemed to have potential with the LEGO games having much longer development cycles than they used to, but dull gameplay and mindless third-person shooting remove any fun that could have been had here. The tone and smattering of franchises from different genres don’t gel well with the gameplay and presentations, creating a game that feels like it was made for no one.
The Final Word
Funko Fusion is a slog to play. The puzzles are uninteresting, and the third-person shooting is tedious. It uses its mature movie franchises in strange ways, adding glood and violence to old-school slapstick comedy, creating a tonal mess.
MonsterVine Rating: 1.5 out of 5 – Terrible
