Over the years the developers and creators of TT games who are best known for the very popular LEGO games from Lego Star Wars 1 to Lego Star Wars the Skywalker Saga have been well regarded for their work. While their games haven’t gotten the recognition they deserve they are best known as some of the best licensed games over the decades they have been in business. After the release of Lego Star Wars the Skywalker Saga most of the staff have left the studio due to variously different reasons to form their own studio 10 10 games. Their studios first game is Funko Fusion, a game that takes many pop culture franchises and tells a story of them coming together to defeat a common foe and saving their respective universes all told using Funko Pops instead of Legos. How does it hold up compared to the Lego games however is a matter that needs to be discussed.
The story of Funko Fusion centers around a villain by the name of Eddy who uses his power to corrupt various worlds and franchises in the Funko Fusion universe. After killing Foxy, severely injuring Funko Freddy and shattering the Funko Crown into many pieces that are then scattered into the multiple franchises within the game, Eddy begins his goal to corrupt the multiverse and as many villains as possible which can be achieved by using the crown in its completed state. Freddy Funko proceeds to ask a group of heroes to return to their world to free it from corruption along with many others in order to stop Eddy before he can reform the crown and take over the universe. The premise is simple and doesn’t add much to the story of a bunch of characters coming together to fight a common enemy which is prevalent in many Pop Culture media. The Developers of TT games have done a similar narrative in LEGO Dimensions, a Toys to Life game that centered around a bunch of characters from different franchises joining forces to fight an enemy who is hell bent on corrupting everything only this time Funko Fusion has mostly localized itself to Universal studios owned properties with more than 20+ franchises and 60 characters to play as with more to come post launch.
As of the games launch Funko Fusion’s list of franchises includes; Back to the Future, BattleStar Galactica, Child’s Play, Five Nights At Freddy’s, Hot Fuzz, Invincible, Jaws, Jurassic Park/World, KFC, Knight Rider, Masters of the Universe, Mega Man, M3gan, Monsters, The Mummy, Nope, Shaun of the Dead, The Thing, The Umbrella Academy, Voltron Legendary Defender, The Walking Dead, and Xena Warrior Princess. Team Fortress 2 was also among these franchises originally as an exclusive to players who bought the game on Steam, but as of now they are available for free on every console. Out of all these franchises only seven of them have up to five levels of story content; these franchises are the ones that impact the main story which are; Hot Fuzz, The Thing, Jurassic World, Battlestar Galactica, The Umbrella Academy, Masters of the Universe, and Scott Pilgrim vs The World. There is no exact order to play these franchises, but it was recommended to some content creators that they play the game in this order in order to unlock important gadgets that can be used to gather collectables and access areas throughout the game. Some of the other franchises as mentioned before do have one level only in the form of “Cameo Levels.” The way Cameo Levels work is that while in the middle of playing one of the main seven franchises the player can come across one of these levels behind a locked purple door using specific items they unlock through playing the main campaign. Cameo Levels take players away from the main quest and plop them into a segment from whatever cameo they come across. An example of this happened while I was playing the first level of The Umbrella Academy, I was able to access a Cameo World that took me to a segment from the Invincible Series, after I played the Cameo I unlocked the character Invincible and I was able to play as him throughout the other franchises. While some characters have levels others have taken up the role as unlocked through find and gathering collectables that can be gathered across multiple different levels like Chucky who is unlocked by playing hide and seek with him once in all seven main franchises.
The main topic of discourse surrounding Funko Fusion is the gameplay itself. The gameplay is very simplistic with it being an over the shoulder action game with very little variety in terms of combat. All characters have long ranged attacks by holding down the left trigger to aim and pressing the right trigger to shoot which can be problematic due to the size of the characters heads blocking half of the screen when aiming. There is also a single attack button that can utilize light combos and a jump smash attack, but outside of that there isn’t much else. Some characters do have different abilities that can be used to solve different puzzles, but only a small handful of them are reserved to certain characters. For example; Childs from The Thing is so far one of the only unlockable characters from the main game who can melt ice and red locks with his flamethrower while Number Five from Umbrella Academy can use teleportation arrows to access certain areas. Another aspect that sets this game apart from the Lego games is that players can utilize Health items and weapons that are gathered from golden chests. Finally another aspect that has players divided is how the game gives players directions, at times the game will give helpful tips on where to go and what to do, but other times the game leaves players in areas where it might be expected the player understands what they need to do, but in actuality they don’t which leads to a lot of unnecessary stress and back tracking.
Overall Funko Fusion is a good first step for the studio, but it has a lot to work out before the developers should consider giving this title a sequel or adding more content.
Overall Score: 6 out of 10
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5