Funko Fusion

Funko Fusion was provided by 1010 Games Ltd for review. Thank you!

When I first saw Funko Fusion's announcement, I had mixed feelings about the game. While it looked like it was gunning for LEGO's crown in the well-known IP with a comedic take, it also looked a bit... Well, flat and unpolished. Now, having played through the game, those first impressions were confirmed.

To set the scene, Funko Fusion starts with a prologue, where an evil entity (known as Eddy) has arrived in WonderWorld, using his powers to corrupt all the worlds. You'll now need to play as various characters from famous IPs to cleanse your worlds of this infection and restore them to normality, largely consisting of playing through scenes in the respective movies. These include Jurassic World, Scott Pilgrim, and Battlestar Galactica.

You might think this is a setup for a great adventure with plenty of nostalgia and neat little easter eggs. Well, it is, but unfortunately, I think the developers missed the mark on this one. Many characters just parrot lines directly from the films they were in (in text, there are no voiced lines in Funko Fusion). And the cutscenes, often a highlight in the LEGO games, just feel rather bland and uninspired here. There are some attempts at humor, but they often fall flat and seem hastily thrown in to try and get a cheap laugh.

While the plot's premise is solid, the execution leaves little to be desired. There is a wide array of characters from various franchises, along with a wide array of weapons, they all play pretty much the same. Some characters, like Scott Pilgrim, have unique weapons, but others have some form of gun. Sometimes, they have an automatic gun where you can hold a button instead of mashing it, and then you can also collect other "guns" like a crossbow or grenade launcher. Sadly, all the guns lack weight and a feeling of impact, with pretty poor sound design and almost no feedback.

The same, sadly, goes for the mission format. Although the environments are varied due to being based on different IPs, the missions feel pretty lackluster in their designs. They often take the form of "hunt down this enemy" and let you scour the map for them, with little indication of where they might be, which I found to be a recurring problem with Funko Fusion.

The game gives you an objective in the bottom right corner, but beyond that, there's often no on-screen indication of where to go or how to achieve that objective.

Funko Fusion falls into an odd space where it feels like it should be a game designed for kids but is based largely on franchises that appeal to adults. The combat difficulty is more kid-friendly, but the lack of direction would frustrate a child. If I gave this to a 5-year-old, they'd give up in a few minutes, frustrated about the lack of clear instructions. The "tutorial" is largely non-existent, teaching you some gameplay mechanics, and then it's up to you to figure out the rest.

What doesn't help is that the game worlds, while not large, are quite open and non-linear, meaning you can walk around for a while trying to figure out where you're meant to go. Objective markers often don't appear until you pick up the relevant object. You may get told to unlock a door, for example, but you aren't told which door or where the key is. Only when you find and pick up the key will a marker appear telling you where to take the key. Because of this, it feels like a puzzle game and not a good one half the time you're playing it.

There's also a mismatch in how the game portrays violence. Humans can be killed at will, and shooting them will cause their heads to pop off, the game loves featuring the decapitation of humans, and nearly every enemy you kill and in a few cutscenes heads will pop off, and not always in the cutesy way that LEGO does it. In most worlds, it is like LEGO, but in The Thing world specifically, killing humans is associated with blood splatter. I don't know why, but the developers obviously decided to have gore in that world, not the rest of the game.

In the "Jurassic World" world, for example, it shows all the dinosaurs as being tranquilized and sleeping, even if you just exploded them with a grenade. Heck, you break open the rib cage of a boss in the world so you can shoot its heart, but don't worry, it's just tranquilized at the end of the fight. However, in the Hot Fuzz world, there are rather gruesome and gory moments of humans being murdered. There are even censored swear words in other places, such as twice where "F**k" appears in the game. If you're portraying violence and allowing us to blow humans apart with blood spray, just use the F word.

Funko Fusion feels like it was a game made by a team that knows how to program and develop a game but didn't have much of a focus on what they wanted to create. It's part puzzle game, part action game. It is a game that initially looks and feels like it was built for kids but with adult themes. It ends up leaving the player quite confused as to what the developer's aim was. There are different standards per world, and that's just strange. There seemed to be no consensus on how the game should handle situations between worlds.

The technical aspects of Funk Fusion are fine. It looks quite good, with the movement and aiming mechanics working just fine, in my opinion. However, almost every aspect of the game's design, from the weapons to the missions, just seems poorly thought out. Unfortunately, graphics don't make a game.

Funko Fusion is its own worst enemy. I wouldn't recommend this game for children because, although that is promised, there's no multiplayer or co-op functionality to help them figure the game out when it gets a bit directionless. Also, some scenes in the game aren't really appropriate for very young players, as there is some blood and gore and half-heartedly censored swearing.

But at the same time, I wouldn't recommend this game to adults either; due to the low difficulty of the combat and rather repetitive nature, it is probably not suited to your average adult gamer. As you progress through the worlds, you realize that all the puzzle elements are the same and usually involve finding a valve or a fuse to power something. Likewise, the mission objectives are to hunt down minibosses or rescue animals.

Funko Fusion - Steam Deck Performance

Funko Fusion will encounter a Visual C++ Runtime error upon first boot. To fix this, follow the steps in this article. Of course, in Step 3, you should select Funko Fusion instead of the Pacific Drive Demo, and I also used VCRun2022 instead of VCRun2019. You can also run the game with Proton GE.

Funko Fusion has many visual settings that we can adjust, but it's also a surprisingly difficult game to run. So we're having to run the game at low settings. I recommend sticking to 40 FPS here, with the option to drop down to 30 FPS if you want to save some battery.

It's worth noting that the cutscenes are pre-rendered, and if you don't run them at 60 FPS, they play in slow motion, resulting in some audio glitches, so you may want to manually disable the frame limit each time a cutscene plays if it bothers you. There are no voice lines in the game, though, so it's not a huge deal if you miss the cutscenes.

While the subtitles themselves are easy to read, sometimes characters in worlds speak through speech bubbles above their heads, which can be hard to read on the Steam Deck's display. There is also no way to adjust their size.

Recommended Settings - 40 FPS

For this, we will set a frame rate limit in SteamOS of 40 FPS and a TDP Limit of 15W.

You'll want to set all in-game settings to the minimum possible, set the upscaling method to FSR3, and use the Quality setting. I did try TSR because I thought it looked better, but I ended up running into issues with excessive GPU usage when using it.

With these settings, you should see a pretty stable 40 FPS for most of the time. There are dips in some areas, such as when an explosion happens, a lot of smoke on screen, or looking through a portal in the Masters of the Universe world. Also, the hub world will gradually worsen performance as you unlock more worlds, so by the end of the game, expect the FPS to be in the low 30s while in the hub world.

Depending on the world you're in, the power draw can vary wildly, from as little as 15W in indoor areas to around 25W in worlds like Hot Fuzz or The Thing.

The game runs hotter, around 70C indoors and 75-85C in more intensive areas. The fan noise is pretty constant, although this does depend on what world you're in.

To save some battery, you can lower the FPS Limit in SteamOS to 30 FPS, which can reduce power draw to around 16-18W even in outside areas. However, the power can still spike above 20W, and I didn't enjoy the game at 30 FPS.

Accessibility:

Funko Fusion has an accessibility menu with a few options. You can disable camera shaking, adjust controller sensitivity, and aim assist. There are also colorblind filters and adjustments to the size of subtitles in the game. It's worth noting, though, that subtitle size doesn't affect the size of subtitles in speech bubbles, just in the text that appears along the bottom of the screen sometimes.

Conclusion:

My primary feeling about Funko Fusion is confusion. Funko Pops and their design often appeal to children, and Funko Fusion feels like it should be a kid's game by its design. The game seems to tiptoe around the area of violence in some worlds, and then straight up lets you blow people's heads off with a shotgun and blood splatter a few moments later in another world.

At this point, I wonder if Universal dictated to the developers what was and wasn't allowed to be portrayed concerning certain IPs.

While this isn't a dealbreaker in itself, it highlights a problem throughout Funko Fusion: the game seems to have many half-baked ideas. Still, the dev team lacked the time or imagination to carry them out. The visual presentation and the technical aspects, such as movement and mechanics, work fine. The problem is that the puzzles are repetitive and tedious, the combat feels hollow, and many missions worldwide are variations on finding lost animals or defeating a series of minibosses.

The lack of any form of multiplayer is also pretty disappointing. The developers stated at launch that the game would receive multiplayer in October 2024 but that it would be launched in stages, not supporting the entire game, and so far, we haven't heard much more about it.

Performance on the Steam Deck is at least decent. You can play Funko Fusion at 40 FPS if you run the lowest settings, with the option to go down to 30 FPS to save some battery life. The controllers also work great, although some of the text in speech bubbles may be hard to read sometimes.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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