Also On: PS4, Xbox Series X, Switch, PC
Publisher: 10:10 Games
Developer: 10:10 Games
Medium: Digital/Physical
Players: 1-4
Online: Not yet
ESRB: T
If it was not for my son’s interest in Funko Pops and the inclusion of Five Nights at Freddy’s, I might never have given Funko Fusion a chance — for better or worse. Funko Fusion is not my type of game, but once I did more research and saw the inclusion of licenses I love like Scott Pilgrim, Child’s Play, and Voltron, that was more than convincing. For the record, this review is a compilation of thoughts on both pre-launch and post-launch versions of the release.
I’m not going to extensively focus on the pre-launch experience though. Lately, if I’m fortunate enough to review a pre-release game by new developer or indie dev, I try to be mindful of technical issues and evaluate the game post-launch to see how the experience improves within the first weeks. With that said, the expectation is if a game is released to the public it should be ready to play. This was not the case with Funko Fusion.
One thing to get out of the way, I’m still to the moment of this writing very conflicted with my overall feeling of Funko Fusion and the reason for the delayed review. This is very much a love-hate relationship I didn’t expect to have, but it makes for a great discussion which I hope to have with someone at 10:10 Games in the future. Well, let’s get started.
Funko Fusion is an adventure platformer with many puzzle elements and collectibles that will give you a run for your money If you are a Lego games fan you will understand the challenge and investment in time you need to commit to collecting and unlocking licensed characters and more. With Funko Fusion, this is one of the biggest setbacks based on my experience and from speaking with fans of those games.
At launch, FF is a single-player experience and has you choose one of Seven worlds based on popular IPs ranging from Scott Pilgrim, Hot Fuzz, He-Man, Jurassic World, and more. Beyond the primary worlds and characters, you will have the chance to find cameo characters and worlds. At this point, many have been shown online including M3gan, Chucky, Voltron and Five Nights at Freddy’s — which is one of the primary reasons I had interest in the game.
This all sounded like a match made in heaven for fans of licenses… or a disaster, depending on the expectation of past bloatware with the history of many licensed-focused games. I will say, you can tell a lot of love and attention went into world-building and making them accurate to their source material. With that said, the initial release was marred with extreme difficulty and limited access to characters when first started.
When you start the game, you are introduced to the Funko brand characters like Freddy Funko Foxxo, and more. The theme focuses on a corrupt entity named Eddy Funko that wants to mold the world into his own and begins the battle of good vs evil. Once you have the prologue completed, you will go into your first world. My initial world of choice was Scott Pilgrim and as you would expect, the levels are mirroring parts of the movie which is awesome. It’s everything I remembered in game form, but this is where the joy stopped.
There was very little guidance on how to proceed and I felt like an amateur wasting an hour or so trying to progress to the next portion to then accidentally attack a purple door and saw it take damage. This is a form of corruption from Eddy and maybe I missed this, but the initial prologue battle was a chore in itself so I may have overlooked it.
This was the type of experience my first couple of sessions went and I was ready to give up once I eventually finished the first level and then saw I would need to finish the entire world before I could use any other characters including the DLC that was provided. It was my moment to step away and look to see if I was the only one. Sure enough, I was not.
There were floods of reports of balance issues and many other things that plagued Funko Fusion at launch. From there, I waited as 10:10 Games made a public announcement that they would be addressing many of the issues ASAP. Fast forward a week later and we have a patch that makes the experience 1,000 times more playable and it was a relief to see.
My main issue was, if this wasn’t ready, delaying the release would have been the best thing, but I think the challenge of being a small indie developer behind a large company may have limited that. This past week the developer pushed out an enormous amount of updates including quality of life balances and improvements to the combat and overall gameplay and play styles. And you could now use any character that is available on any level, which was the first of many significant steps to improve the game experience.
We are now about a month post launch and the game has taken on a new life, and I’m happy the developers took the time to address so much in so little time. This is a rare instance where I would have preferred to review the game post launch due to the vast changes and improvements, but I’m happy to have my unique take on seeing both ends. One thing I will proudly share about my experience is that, although the game heavily relies on licensed IPs, most of which I was already familiar with, it was Umbrella Academy that stood out. It had been on my watchlist for a while, but thanks to playing in the world of Funko Fusion, I was intrigued by the characters and the universe, and I ended up watching the entire series. I’m now a fan so I think the job they set out has been completed. For this reason and the extraordinary work that 10:10 Games has done since launch, my Funko Fusion score is more positive than first expected, and the current state of the game is recommended for sure.
Note: 10:10 Games provided us with Funko Fusion code for review purposes.
