Every second of Funko Fusion is a fight for one’s life. The combat is relentless, and chaos reigns. Days later, even when I am not there, I am there, languishing in its mashup worlds. I am haunted.
I underestimated the third-person action game, like many would. 10:10 Games’ stated mission for Funko Fusion, based on the popular collectible that seems to represent 95% of GameStop sales if the stores are any indication, was for players to “experience a festival of fandom like never before.” I assumed a collision of Universal Pictures IP — from Back to the Future to Hot Fuzz and The Umbrella Academy — rendered in the style of the beady-eyed Funko Pop! would result in an all-ages romp. Wrong.
Funko Fusion is a for-the-fans dream machine, yes, but through morbid humor and disorienting play, it operates more like a nightmare simulator. It’s a game with 500% more blood, bones, and gruesome body horror than expected. The design is bubbly, but the levels pulse with Sekiro-like aggression. Nearly every character, regardless of their universe of origin, packs a gun — a requirement to survive encounters with the game’s overpowered adversaries. In Funko Fusion, “The Funko Pops had been decimated” takes on all-new meaning.
Players choose their playable protagonist from a variety of hero Funkos, like Prince Adam/He-Man or everyone’s favorite Jurassic World raptor trainer [checks notes] Owen Grady, and unlock more as they complete challenges in levels based on movies and shows. As Scott Pilgrim, you can fight Ramona Flowers’ boyfriends in a more traditional storyline or blast through the Cylon-filled halls of the Battlestar Galactica later on. Some of the Funkos have special abilities that allow them to reach inaccessible spots or open locked doors to secret levels. It’s hard to imagine that re-running a level with a new set of characters would be super fun… as my hours playing Funko Fusion were spent just trying to achieve the basics of completing quests and trying to figure out the parameters of each quest with little guidance. I died repeatedly in my early play, which meant restarting and redoing the entire level, complete with unskippable cutscenes.
Most of the cutscenes are excuses to see the Funko versions of characters play out memorable scenes from their respective source material. The animation in Funko Fusion is the most polished and promising aspect of the game, even if all the mouthless characters look infected with the black oil virus from X-Files and the sketches don’t advance the story. Yes… the story… there is one. The setup hinges on a non-branded character: Eddy Funko, the slimy mirror image of Pop! mascot Freddy Funko. Eddy, evidently, has been trapped in the Wonder Well (?) for ages and is ready to do some evil. He steals Freddy’s magical crown, then rips the fucking skin off Freddy’s fox friend and rolls his skull across the floor. WHAT THE HELL. This initiates the opening prologue fight, which pits your chosen character against a malformed, mutated Eddy Fox that spurts out purple pus monsters onto the floor.
It’s easy to be cynical about Funko Fusion, but there are plenty of quality games that expand on the play of toy lines. Lego titles have over and over again successfully translated the thrill of a build into third-person minifig gaming. The dress-up genre as we know it wouldn’t exist without Barbie. Timing is also key: iam8bit’s 2022 faux-NES game Garbage Pail Kids: Mad Mike and the Quest for Stale Gum cashed in on the vile toy line’s ironic era with a side-scroller full of farts.
While Funkos are more shelf ornaments than play things, it still felt like there was potential for a game version of the property to make un-toyetic cinema zanier and clarify the point of the Funko Pop! as an aesthetic. The on-paper promise of Skeletor taking on the saucer alien Jean Jacket from Jordan Peele’s Nope sounded pretty fun. But I will never get to that part of the game, or likely ever understand the appeal of a Funko Pop!. For I am stuck in the ultimate Funko Fusion experience, a flattening of pop culture into incoherent slop.
The early levels — I chose to go down the Scott Pilgrim track first — saw little telegraphing of how to play, what to do, or what rewards I could expect from doing a good job. I had a much easier time picking up Elden Ring than Funko Fusion. There are tons of collectibles scattered around the worlds, including, uh, buckets of KFC chicken and the outlines of unobtained characters, reminding you to keep working so that one day you can walk Jurassic Park founder John Hammond around a Five Nights at Freddy’s level or whatever. I spent a good deal of time trying to throw soda cans away in a recycling bin only to get blasted by fireballs, which literally singed my character’s face off.
Why am I collecting these soda cans? I would often wonder to myself before getting attacked from behind by eight assailants who would kill me, leading to a grace period in which my ghost form could collect more gems to pay for a revival. There are plenty of coherent mechanics at the core of Funko Fusion’s gameplay, but rarely did they surface in a way that allowed me to understand them.
Horror buffs revere P.T., but when Funko Fusion disappears from digital storefronts due to lapsed licensing deals with Universal Pictures, as I assume it one day will, it might command the same cult status. It’s one of the more chilling experiences I have had playing a game. The overstuffed tie-in levels still have the dissociative power of liminal space. The loose aim system makes the gun-based combat disjointed, but unlike Dragon’s Dogma 2, it lacks the power of realism in that most of what you are shooting are fuming Funko Pops who want to kill you. The task to collect everything there is to collect, but doing it without a map or an explanation to what exactly is a collectible in a given level, has the vibe of a Saw trap. I am almost embarrassed to say it, because it’s Funko Fusion, but the fury of the AI combined with the scale of the game triggered a claustrophobia I wasn’t aware I had. I was suffocating. None of these design decisions feel like an accident, based on the number of skeletons you encounter in the game.
As Funko Fusion repeatedly reminded me, life is fleeting. I wanted to push, push, push to see what a Funkofied The Mummy level would look like, but hours in, I knew the reward wouldn’t outweigh the effort. I had to step away. Or I think I did. To be honest, I might still be playing Funko Fusion, and I am actually asleep and this is the dream. I don’t know. I just want to live.
Funko Fusion is out now on PC, Playstation 5 and 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series X and S. The game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X using a pre-release download code provided by 10:10 Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/horror/456218/funko-fusion-review-impressions
