Funko Fusion
Released: September 13th, 2024
Developer: 1010 Games Ltd
Publisher: 1010 Games Ltd
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Switch, Xbox X/S
For the Funko brand’s many critics, Funko Fusion is a gift.
This cynical piece of shit does so much to demonstrate how Funko Pops are soulless commodifications of art by commodifying art to such a soulless degree it's almost unbelievable. The vapidity on display could be taken as a satire of how corporations are strip mining pop culture for financial gain, save for the fact that it grips its own pickaxe with brutally serious intent.
It's also a really bad game. Badly designed, badly presented, broken in several glaring ways and devoid of a single original idea. I have not one positive thing to say about it. Every single aspect of this game... this product... is a shocking embarrassment.
Funko Fusion isn’t just a shabby product, it’s one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever had to witness. It's a wretched cultural scavenger that dismantles better media for parts, then utilizes said parts in a way that showcases a thorough lack of skill and understanding. Gameplay is rudimentary at best, its audiovisual components are as basic as the developers could get away with, and the whole thing comes off as a minimum viable product.
Because that's what it is.
Essentially a really shit version of the Lego games, Fusion is an inept action-shooter taking place across several worlds themed after whatever movies and TV shows it could get its hands on. Because we now live in a world where context is dead and all creative media is seen as nothing but hollow “intellectual property,” there's no rhyme or reason to the choice of source material. The worlds on offer are jarringly disparate in theme and content, unified only by an aggressively bland Funko aesthetic that assures visual cohesion through regimented genericism.
Beyond every character being undetailed dolls with swollen heads and voids for eyes, nothing in Funko Fusion’s charmless universe would, could, or should coexist.
What do Umbrella Academy, Masters of the Universe, and Hot Fuzz have to do with each other, either narratively or tonally? Who fucking cares, right? It’s all just property to those with the ill-gotten rights, just more drops in a soup of brand names and recognizable images that have no value beyond the strictly fiscal. If Funko Fusion does one useful thing, it's provide a perfect example of how companies regard their stockpile of properties as completely interchangeable.
Even then, the properties used are just plain bizarre because what financial rewards await those who put Hot Fuzz in a 2024 kids’ game? Are they just utilizing whatever properties were cheapest to license? Were they throwing darts at a wall full of movie posters? It’s a grim indicator of how meaningless this game is and how subsequently meaningless it wants the source material to be that anything works to serve its shallow purposes.
That's exactly the attitude this game radiates from the outset: So long as Funko Fusion doesn’t have to have any ideas of its own - because God forbid - then literally any fucking IP will do. It’s all just meat for the Funko grinder.
There’s a set of levels based on The Thing, and do you know who the enemies in the first level are? The Norwegians. Yes, the small group of terrified Norwegians who are killed in a tragic misunderstanding at the start of the film… they are the endlessly respawning mooks you repeatedly kill for fun, and that’s all they are to the hacks who spewed this game out.
Funko Fusion doesn’t give a shit about The Thing. It doesn’t give a shit about anything. It doesn’t see stories, or themes, or even characters in the work it has the nerve to reconstitute for a quick buck - it sees only nebulous "content." It’s barely more thoughtful than an AI algorithm in this regard, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if AI was involved in the development.
Also, the appearance of The Thing at all is just plain creepy on a meta level.
If it were more self aware, Fusion might have at least had fun with the idea of a disturbing horror movie featuring in such a cartoony package, but the thoughtless parroting of source material makes it resemble those fucked up YouTube videos - the ones that present themselves as suitable for kids but are full of disturbing imagery designed to upset them. Some of the cutscenes do, in fact, look identical to the kind of crap I’ve seen parents having to stop their children watching.
You are doing something deeply wrong if your garbage is on par with the type of videos even YouTube performatively cracks down on. A few additional (and trite) sight gags here and there do nothing to detract from how these cutscenes replicate existing things with lazy abandon.
Anyway, if you haven’t watched any of the movies or shows this game regurgitates, the “plot” each world loosely follows will literally make no sense. Characters are given no real introduction and cutscenes loosely ape the originals without any dialog or explanation, because anything more than that would take effort. This is not seen as a problem by the game, of course, because once again it doesn’t give a shit.
Who needs context for why the characters are doing things? Context is dead. There is only content.
I could honestly talk about how intellectually offensive Funko Fusion is for hours, but I ought to reiterate that it’s also just an incredibly crap videogame. Forget how tacky it is, let’s discuss how truly bloody inept it is.
With its soapy controls, basic graphics, and downright prehistoric combat system, Funko Fusion is stunning in just how immediately shitty it is. The moment I started moving my character I was hit by how unwieldy and ugly everything was, and at no point would the situation ever get anything but worse.
Gameplay is about as rudimentary as it could be - you run around small environments performing basic puzzles and trying to fight swarms of annoying enemies with awkward melee attacks and ineffective projectiles. Its so old fashioned, so basic, and yet it’s so poorly put together you’d think it was far above the skill level or pay grade of the developers.
Whatever character you pick, they all largely behave the same. Each one has a melee attack, a shitty projectile, and an ability that's usually defensive - some have shields, some have special attacks, but you’ll soon learn the best characters are the ones who forgo anything too gimmicky and just have a plain dodge roll. Being able to actually evade all the bullshit haphazardly thrown at you is more useful than literally anything else.
The sheer repetitiveness of gameplay can’t be overstated. Each world introduces a new type of puzzle which it will then drive into the fucking ground over the course of several levels. In the He-Man stages you’ll be doing simplistic portal puzzles, in Battlestar Galactica you’ll be shooting lasers through differently shaped lenses to open corresponding doors. You will do these things over and over and over again.
Repetition is one of the game’s many overbearing flaws. Whether it’s performing a series of actions half a dozen times, solving the same set of puzzles, or fighting an absurdly long boss fight that doesn’t alter its patterns or tactics, there is nothing in this game that you’ll ever just do once. Or twice. Or bloody thrice. There ain’t one horse corpse going unbeaten.
On top of this, if you want all the collectibles you'll be expected to replay a lot of levels as you unlock craftible tools and characters with certain abilities. You won’t know this when you first start playing, however, because for all the text this game uses to explain pointless shit, it’s consistently vague when it comes to actions and objectives you do need to know about.
The aforementioned He-Man levels are probably the worst of a terrible lot, a series of absolute disasters full of poorly explained objectives, respawning waves of harassing enemies, and some truly awful boss encounters. They couldn't even use the Masters of the Universe theme tune correctly - it sounds like a poorly compressed sample and it unceremoniously ends shortly after you've transformed into He-Man, leaving you with nothing.
The whole game is a complete fucking mess, mechanically on par with some of the less refined action games of the PlayStation One era. To call characters “clunky” is to severely undersell how unresponsive and unwieldy they feel to control. The camera gets caught on things, the laggy aiming system is in desperate need of a lock-on function, and characters frequently get stuck inside other objects.
Any large scale fight sequence is horrible to suffer through - enemies harass you from all angles, and there’s rarely anywhere to get cover from the “thousand cuts” of gunfire thrown your way. For some reason, healing items are treated like fucking Estus Flasks, as it takes a stupidly long time to use them and healing can be interrupted by a single enemy shot.
Dark Souls you ain’t, Funko Fusion. Sit the fuck down.
If you die, you restart the whole level. There are no checkpoints, and your progress is flushed down the toilet. Of course, you don’t have to die in order to lose up to twenty minutes of your life - there are plenty of bugs and glitches that could softlock you and force a restart as well. Getting halfway through a level only to lose all your progress because Mer-Man got stuck inside a wall and couldn't take damage is just fucking rubbish.
Some of the cutscenes seem to be unskippable even when you revisit a stage. Only some of them though, because why bother being consistent?
Physics glitches, game breaking bugs, missing textures, and disappearing audio are all part of a package that looks and sounds like wet garbage even when it’s running as well as it can. We’re talking about some real cheap, low-effort shoddiness here. The kind of game so lacking in audiovisual presentation it barely seems to have any, the kind of game that feels interminably quiet even when the volume’s turned up because there's no energy behind what you're seeing and hearing.
But hey, at least there are collectible KFC buckets, because a glorified commercial for an overexposed toy line should also contain glorified commercials!
Funko Fusion disgustingly reflects pop culture’s current climate of frenzied exploitation - a random grab bag of “intellectual property” smashed together without even a basic understanding of the vapidly appropriated material. Its gameplay is dated and dreary, it’s riddled with bugs, and it’s as devoid of charm and character as the toys it’s trying to sell.
Cynical doesn’t even begin to describe such a poisonous display of IP leverage. There’s something actively nasty about the thing. It’s a reminder that creativity is not owned by the creators, it is imprisoned by the least creative among us, those of us who force others to dance but can't carry a tune.
The fact that parents will unknowingly buy their kids this archaic game full of shit they’ve never heard of, gameplay they won’t like, and content that might legitimately upset them, makes me genuinely fucking furious. Fuck Funko Fusion, and fuck those responsible for selling the horrid little thing.
1/10
