Like a plastic plague, those pop figures took over the world. I never understood the hype for them, especially when they infested all the game shops in my town like rats. A video game store with only two rows of video games amongst a slope of toys and Pop figures is not a video game store in my book!
Anyhow, that leads us to Funko Fusion, the effective poster child of all those figures in video game form. Well, at least we can play these weird figures on the computer! Big thanks to the developers at 1010 Games for providing us a review copy of the game. Funko Fusion is definitely geared for children with all the pop culture characters showing up and its collectible open world design. While I have had some enjoyment in the core gameplay when I needed some junk food, Funko Fusion struggles with poor optimization and some flat game design.
I also was unable to take any in-game screenshots unfortunately, I’ve been having issues with that on Steam lately!
Funko Fusion’s plot is built with fanservice in mind. Set in a conglomeration of famous IPS, an evil entity known as Eddy has arrived to take over the realms, and it is up to you to lead these characters to salvation. These include characters from Jurassic World, Scott Pilgrim, and Battlestar Galactica. It is designed for kids from all forms, and unfortunately, I had little interest in the characters as a whole. They just spoke lines directly from their movie tie-ins, and the lack of voice acting in Funko Fusion makes their lack of charisma even more unappealing. Missed potential is something I kept thinking about the game.
The same goes for the gameplay. The world environments are pretty nice looking with all the varied biomes, with characters with tons of different weapons to use. One of the things I quite enjoyed was the transversal mechanics, and it was fun to explore the regions. However, all this is blunted by the lackluster open world mission problems we see with a lot of games: fetch quests and killing enemies. The combat is fairly basic and it is not what I would call deep, unfortunately.
There are also a lot of puzzle objectives in the game which come with some issues I had with navigation. This is a pretty big open world and a lot of non-linearity on where to go, but knowing what door to unlock was playing a game of Chinese Whispers with blind people. Roaming the large open world without great map navigation on where to go next only added to my frustrations.
On the technical side, I struggled with some bugs and glitches. During the Jurassic world biome I had major stuttering when travelling the map, and one of the keys I needed to progress never appeared. Even though my laptop exceeds the recommended specs to play the game well, it was never able to hit 60FPS. There are some optimization problems with Funko Fusion, which is unfortunate.
A lot of this has been me criticizing the game, and while I have genuine gripes with Funko Fusion, a deeply flawed game does not always make it bad to play. There are days when I have wanted nothing else than to sit with a game that requires little thinking. I call these my ‘Junk Food games’, and those include titles like Starfield, Watchdogs: Legion, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, and Kenshi. While I find plenty of problems with Funko Fusion, something about the exploration and repetitive, low difficulty gameplay made it an interesting game when I just wanted to settle down for the evening with tea and snacks.
Despite this, I feel Funko Fusion is a difficult sell at its current price tag of $34.99, and that does not include its many DLC packs. There is a lot of potential for a Funko Pop game, and while Funko Fusion has some nice ideas, the overall package does not do enough to tempt me. It does go on sale often, and the most recent sale knocked off 50% of the base price. If you’re in the mood for an inoffensive open world with real-world IP references, Funko Fusion is a decent romp for that discount. I enjoyed the exploration enough to recommend it at that discount.
