What was that? (Funko Fusion in review)

 Hey friends, have you ever played a game or watched a movie that made you ask yourself every few seconds, "Who did they make this for?" That is a question that I began asking at the character select screen for Funko Fusion, and a question that I repeated ad nauseum until the game came to a close. I ended up playing all the way through this game, and while I didn't really enjoy my time with it for the most part, there is definitely a lot to talk about in it. I hope you'll bear with me today as I recount one of the strangest games that I've played in some time, and hopefully it'll at least be funny. Today, we're taking a trip to the Funko Wonderworks Factory.

An Unexpected Amount of Lore...

    Funko Fusion is essentially an effort to make a Lego game with a bunch of different properties, but with Funko Pop figures. It's going to be like Lego Dimensions, but without the real life figures, right? That's what I thought going into the game, but the truth is, it goes much deeper than that. The game begins by saying, "Everyone is a fan of something! Pick your favorite property!" You're presented with a list of characters from Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Jurassic World, Masters of the Universe, The Thing, Battlestar Galactica, and The Umbrella Academy. Immediately I was so thrown off by the random hodgepodge of properties, most of which were not appealing to little kids, which I assumed this game was probably made for. I chose Scott Pilgrim to start out with, because it was one of the two properties that I actually was familiar with, and I was spit out into the Funko Factory, where I met Foxxo the Fox, and he ran me through a short tutorial of how to build objects from the Blue vending machine (something that I had to do quite a lot in this game), and then we got to the hub. Here you meet Freddy Funko, who is the guy in charge of the Funko Pop factory... and then an evil creature comes out of the sewer and melts the flesh off of Foxxo's body, leaving only a skeleton. From there, the creature infects Foxxo's bones and makes you fight a giant purple goopy version of the fox character that you just met. Why did they create an original character for the Funko game only to kill him off immediately? The tone of this move is so bizarre, I just don't understand what they thought they would accomplish here, but I'll get back to Foxxo later when I'm talking about collectibles. Freddy fights this monster which takes on his form, but an evil version, so he calls himself Eddy, for Evil Freddy. I swear someone just wrote that line in 5 seconds, and everyone just went with it. Eddy takes the crown off of Freddy's head and starts melting him too, but then our character is able to summon a giant Robo-Freddy by absorbing the plasma goop from the giant Foxxo monster. Freddy's Crown was shattered into smaller gold and silver crowns that were spread out to all of the different levels, and that's where the collectibles come from in this game. Freddy is put out of commission after Eddy's attack, being on literal life support where he stays inside his box for the whole game, so it's up to all of the characters from the different "Wonder Worlds" to take out Eddy and get the crowns back.

    The game takes place across the 6 worlds that I discussed, with 5 levels in each. Each level ends when you pick up the Gold Crown, and in the level there are a few Silver Crowns to pick up from doing different objectives in the level. In addition, each world has a different weapon and gadget, which you unlock by picking up different "Proto-Parts" and putting them in the machine of the same color. Each level has a Red and a Green ProtoPart, with Red being for the exclusive weapons, and Green being for the Soda vending machines that can heal you, make you faster, invincible, etc. Along with these collectibles, in every level, there is a Fossil from Jurassic Park, a Foxxo body part (since Eddy killed him at the beginning, I guess he spread a piece of his body in every level, which also seems wildly violent), and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. KFC is in the game, and I have no explanation for it. There is also a Cameo Quest for every level, some with more than one, meaning that you're doing a mission for Michael Knight from "Knight Rider," "Voltron," Mega-Man, Chucky the evil possessed doll, "Xena: Warrior Princess," and the list just goes on and on. It sounds like I'm getting ready to start telling a joke, but I'm really not, I just can't believe that all of those characters are in there. To unlock the different Cameo Characters, I guess they thought that it would be too easy to just do one mission for them all... so instead, you have to complete seven challenges and deposit their Red Proto-Parts into the vending machine to unlock them as a playable character. I will say that this is probably the coolest part about the game, the crazy roster of all these different properties that are referenced, but to do seven challenges before you get to play as them, it just makes it feel like a chore. Along with the quests that are tacked onto other levels, there are full Cameo levels, based on different properties such as Jaws and Five Nights at Freddy's, and they unlock new characters from those franchises as well.

    As I stated earlier, one of the properties that is used for the main levels is The Thing, which is a legitimate horror movie, and a very weird property to be here for what is perceived by many to be a knock off Lego game. It's far from the childhood fun of Lego, but I just can't understand so many decisions made here. On top of the extremely convoluted way to get through a level, it's clear that most of the development was aimed towards adults, though I just can't understand why. Most adults that that I know are not itching to play a new Lego game, in the same way that kids aren't quite ready for Dead Space or Bioshock, so I really don't understand why they took this path in creating what is a sometimes pretty violent game, and then putting it in the weird chibi style of Pop Funko. 

    The gadgets that I referred to earlier that are introduced in the levels have to be collected in those levels before they can be made in another one. This made it so the first few times I encountered a puzzle element that had to do with something, I had no idea what it was talking about, because I didn't know that there was an item that would do the specific thing that they were looking for. In order to melt things, for example, you have to get the propane tank which you get from The Thing world, which I chose to do 5th, because I didn't know that I would get something so useful from that level. To get the Battery gadget, you have to do the Jurassic World level, which I didn't do until I got my third choice of world. There were battery switches and charging stations everywhere in the first two areas that I went through, and I just didn't understand what I was missing. The characters are the same way, there are a few characters that were extremely powerful and useful for the different missions, but the game just didn't really do anything to tell me, other than a few stickers on the box of different Funko characters. Number Five from Umbrella Academy can teleport, and no one else in the entire game can do that, so I ended up using him way more than most people in the game. As far as I could tell, He-Man was the only character who could break the shiny gold boxes, so I used him much more often. Dilophosaurus is way faster than any other characters, so in order to beat Knight Rider in a race (which, again, is something I did seven times), I needed to use either him, or a speed soda which makes your character go way faster. As far as I could tell, there was very little that actually told you any of these facts unless you really went digging on the character select screen. Just very bizarre to have something as crucial as one of these things tied to a specific character instead of having several characters that would work, especially given the massive size of the character roster.

    I really don't want to rant about this game anymore. There were some interesting points to it, I think there was a cool idea buried under the myriad technical problems and lack of cohesiveness, the story was pure nonsense, to the point where in the final act, you learn that Freddy accidentally spawned Eddy from his sadness and fears over losing his grandmother, a character that had not even been mentioned until that point, and was never brought up again. The whole story is just really sloppy, and while a lot of the fan service is cool, the monotony and tedium tying this game down made me more than happy to put it down as soon as I finished it. Most people won't get that far, but I wanted to commit to the bit, and stuck it out until the end. It's a shame, I really wanted to get Mega Man, but I'm afraid that he just wasn't worth the effort of tracking him through all the levels, and hoping that the cameo quest would actually be tied to him and not someone else. Maybe sometime in the future, I'll feel up to going back to this title, but for now, I think I'm okay.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends. I don't like writing negative reviews that often, and I try to find the positive in most games that I play, but this game was clearly put out in a pretty unfinished state. Like I said, I did like some aspects of the gameplay, but more often than not, I just couldn't understand why the decisions had been made to make this game the way that it is. I hope you all have a great week, and I hope you're doing alright. Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed begrudging Funko Pop collector, and I'll talk to you again soon.