Funko Fusion review

As a proud modern day geek there’s little I enjoy more than collecting and displaying nerdy little bits of merchandise around the house, and there are no shortage of options to purchase when your pocket contains a little extra change. Few are as iconic and popular as the vinyl Funko Pop, and with their big heads and beady eyes they come in enough shapes and sizes to appeal to even the most picky pop culture fan. Now there have been countless video game themed Funkos, but until Funko Fusion there hasn’t been a video game based on Funkos. With a load of wonderful nerd franchises represented and bobble headed characters to play as it should be a crossover game for the ages, but unfortunately that isn’t quite the case.

After an attack from an evil purple invader, the world of Funko Pops is in danger. The noble leader of the Funkos (Freddy) is left injured and unable to leave the factory, and the crown that holds the power of the kingdom is missing. As one of many well known characters it’s up to you to blast your way through themed worlds, find collectibles, and save the day for all lovers of vinyl figures.

Your first decision before you’re greeted with this scene is to choose your very first character, which will unlock your first themed world. For some this decision will be particularly tricky, because how could you possibly pick between Battlestar Galactica, Scott Pilgrim, and The Thing. These are but a handful of the franchises featuring characters that Funko Fusion has on its roster, each with their own unique weapons and abilities.

At its core Funko Fusion is a third person shooter, just one featuring a lot of big headed plastic characters. Aiming and shooting with your weapon of choice is perfectly acceptable, but you’ll soon find the combat more than a little frustrating when a silly amount of generic identical enemies start charging you and you’re almost immediately overwhelmed. Melee combat can help a little in this situation, but no matter what, you’ll take a lot of damage even in the earliest stages of the game; especially if you’re playing alone.

When you aren’t blasting pop culture baddies you’ll be exploring pop culture stages, which are fairly poorly designed. They all feature some sort of main objective which will involve crafting items and more than likely getting stuck thanks to very little guidance on what to do next. Crafting is something you’ll do a lot in Funko Fusion: in The Umbrella Academy world this is usually a gramophone that will cheer people up, in the Jurassic World stages it’s more likely to be a battery that’ll open doors. You’ll repeat this over and over again, solving basic puzzles to make your way to objectives or collectibles.

If you’re a fan of gathering every last shiny glowing orb in your video games then Funko Fusion has you covered. Each stage features loads of silver crowns to collect that unlock secret characters, and a variety of pop culture doodads that NPCs in the hub world will appreciate you bringing them. Not all of them can be gathered on your first run through either, requiring a selection of characters from other worlds to obtain, similarly to how the LEGO games work.

You’d like to hope that in a game with so many exciting characters it’d be worth switching between them, but in the majority of cases they’re pretty much identical. Occasionally you’ll get a special character like Alison who can use her powers to convince someone to do her bidding (which usually involves moving out of the way of a door or dropping a key item), but for the most part they just have different and fairly generic types of gun. I wish I’d known how to tell which characters had powers before unlocking my first world too, because my starting Hot Fuzz themed adventure brought me absolutely nothing useful and meant I couldn’t backtrack to grab extra bits for ages.

Most of my issues so far with Funko Fusion stem from the fact that it’s a little uninspired and a bit dull, but it also has some firmer and more annoying issues alongside this. So many types of enemy become immune to different types of damage for no feasible reason. So you’ll be happily shooting them and when you stun them their damage numbers will stop and you’ll have to get up close with melee to do damage. Bosses do this even more frequently, and because of this, and how long they take to beat, are probably the least fun aspect of the whole game.

Although it would be less of an issue if the game was simply more fun to play, the fact that the world’s inspired by massive franchises feel so soulless is truly a bummer. I shouldn’t be walking around The Umbrella Academy itself trying to work out whose bedroom is whose, it should be an obvious discovery that brings joy to a fan’s heart. Jurassic World stages shouldn’t be generic unrecognisable jungles you get lost in because there are no landmarks; they should be full of references and familiar scenes. There are admittedly some more standout stages too, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Even the cutscenes struggle to capture the silly fun that the LEGO titles so often managed (although they absolutely attempt to) and the fact they can’t be skipped on repeat playthroughs is another problem entirely.

I wish that I could say that Funko Fusion was fun but forgettable game, or a game that you get audiences and mega fans will get a lot out of, but truthfully it’s just a bit boring from start to finish. If the amount of enjoyment contained within was equal to the amount of exciting characters of movies, TV shows and video games it featured then it’d be an all time classic, but instead it’s just a game to urge caution over. Perhaps with future updates, and the addition of online co-op, things might change for but for now, it’s hard to recommend.