Funko Fusion is a fun mash-up but does more backtracking than Marty McFly

Way back when the first Lego Star Wars game was released in 2005, players marvelled at the way it retold Episodes I-III in a hilarious way without a single word of dialogue.

When it was announced that a sequel was coming that would focus on the original trilogy, I remember wondering how it would handle the famous “I am your father” scene without those immortal lines being uttered.

It did so brilliantly, with Vader showing Luke a polaroid photo of Anakin Skywalker pre-Vader, with a pregnant Padme. Vader points at Padme’s baby bump, then points at Luke. I laughed out loud.

Nearly two decades since then, Funko Fusion is attempting to do the same thing, with a new team partly comprised of former Lego series developers Traveller’s Tales / TT Games. This time, however, I didn’t laugh out loud.

That’s not to say the game isn’t amusing – many of its recreations of key scenes from the movies and TV shows it represents did raise a smile – but there’s something about Funko Fusion that doesn’t quite hit the same levels of charm and personality that its spiritual ancestors did.

If it’s passed you by until now, Funko Fusion is an action adventure game that, as the title suggests, mashes up a variety of IPs and presents them in the style of the Funko Pop toys that have taken over every video game and comic book store in the western world for a number of years now.

Although the game boasts over 20 licences, be aware that they’re not all given the same treatment. Only seven of these have their own hub worlds with multiple levels, like you’d expect in your typical multi-movie Lego game.

As such, in order to get the most out of the game you’ll really have to be a fan of Hot Fuzz, Jurassic World, The Thing, Battlestar Galactica (the ‘70s version), The Umbrella Academy, Masters of the Universe or Scott Pilgrim vs The World – or ideally as many of those as possible – because it’s in these universes where you’re going to be spending the vast majority of your time.

Players with a particular love for some of the other IPs listed in the game’s trailers – such as Five Nights at Freddy’s, Back to the Future, Jaws or Nope – will have to make do for smaller ‘cameo’ stages (as opposed to multi-level campaigns), and have to put in the hours before they can play them.

These cameo stages are hidden inside other IPs’ worlds, and before you access them you’ll have to unlock a bunch of stuff first. You’re initially restricted to specific characters when you first play through a chapter. Play through the Scott Pilgrim world, for example, and you’ll only be able to choose between Scott Pilgrim, Ramona Flowers, Knives Chau and Stephen Stills – the characters from that particular IP, in other words.

As in the Lego games, however, once you beat a stage you can then revisit it in what Funko Fusion calls ‘Funplay’ mode, which allows you to choose any of your unlocked characters from across any IP and use them (and their unique abilities). You still have to unlock these other IPs first, however.

As an example of how this plays out in the game, let’s say you’re a big Jaws fan and you’ve heard it’s represented in the game, so you want to check it out. To play the Jaws stage, you first have to find where it’s hiding – which is a portal inside a bait shop in stage 3 of the Hot Fuzz world – but to reach it you then need a character who can use a flamethrower, and another character who has an energy weapon.

Neither of these are abilities that can be performed by the Hot Fuzz characters, meaning you have to unlock The Thing and Battlestar Galactica stages first, and then come back to the Hot Fuzz level to unlock the Jaws area. All of the cameo stages are unlocked in this way, from The Mummy to Invincible to Shaun of the Dead.

In one sense it’s not a massive deal, as long as the player approaches it like a Lego game – focus on getting through every world in a linear fashion first, then once the credits roll you can replay the game and use all your now-unlocked characters to tick off all the secrets you couldn’t access the first time around. It just feels even more abstract than it has in the past.

Thankfully, the game itself is fun to play at a core level, so the excessive backtracking isn’t a complete chore. Played from an over-the-shoulder perspective it has a stronger focus on firearms than the earlier TT Games offerings, and the nature of the Funko Pop design – little tiny bodies and enormous heads – means the enemies feel like they were built with satisfying video game mechanics in mind, allowing you to pick them off with headshots from a mile away.

“The nature of the Funko Pop design – little tiny bodies and enormous heads – means the enemies feel like they were built with satisfying video game mechanics in mind, allowing you to pick them off with headshots from a mile away.”

The game is balanced well enough in that you get enough energy to soak up bullets for a while, but not so much that you can run around invincible. You still need to be careful during combat because you can often become heavily outnumbered, but the only times it becomes frustrating are when you wilfully run into a situation that makes this a possibility.

It’s just that it’s impossible to keep making comparisons to the Lego games – as we’ve done numerous times in this review – given the team’s pedigree and the way the game is clearly based on what they worked on in the past, from the aforementioned way some things are deliberately locked away until you return with new characters, to the way that smacking any object lying around will almost always rewards you with a little shower of studs vinyl pieces.

When these comparisons are made, then, it does feel that while Funko Fusion has been wise to borrow from the series that many of its team found huge success with in the past, something has been lost in that trip through the multiverse portal from TT Games to 10:10 Games, and the personality just feels slightly off.

The decision to have no dialogue in cutscenes is fine, but they just aren’t that funny, perhaps partly because they’re dealing with IPs that aren’t Star Wars or Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, and as such aren’t rich in iconic pop culture scenes that can be recreated in mime form with any real confidence. Then, during gameplay, dialogue is actually introduced in the form of text boxes and speech bubbles, but these too miss the mark comedically.

The sheer amount of backtracking also lends the game a sort of artificial longevity, and while we do still have fun playing the game it can be quite a slog having to chase unlockable characters through multiple levels.

It’s great that Chucky’s in there as a secret character, but not so great that you have to first find him (in Hot Fuzz level 4) then proceed to find him in six other levels (including two cameo ones, which require their own conditions to unlock) before you can add him to your roster. Same process goes for the lieks of M3gan, Knight Rider, Xena and Mega Man. It’s a hell of a lot of work which means that getting a full 100% completion in the game will take many tens of hours of wandering around, looking for hidden nooks and crannies.

This writer is still happy that Funko Fusion exists, because I’m a sucker for a crossover and it’s still fun seeing He-Man fighting raptors in Jurassic World. With any luck, it’ll sell well enough to justify either a sequel or DLC, leading to the addition of more licenses to make for even sillier combinations.

At the moment, however, there’s just too much busywork involved in unlocking everything to justify recommending it to absolutely everybody. If you’re the sort of player who gets a kick out of exploring every nook of a stage and collecting a bunch of different types of item to 100% a game, you’ll be in hog’s heaven here.

Others, however, may feel the same way some feel about the Funko Pop toys themselves – impressed that they were able to acquire all those licences, but slightly disappointed that they were used in that way.