For years, the Lego franchise has dominated a specific space for licensed action-platformers, taking the essence of properties ranging from Star Wars to Harry Potter and transposing them into a goofy video game setting. What makes the Lego games fun, apart from their players’ affinity for colorful blocks, is the lighthearted tone inherent in translating the stories of various movies into toy form.
Funko Fusion has a lot of surface similarities with Lego’s takes on video games, and the main one is a similarly comedic take on a lot of subject matter. Where Lego generally skews young, however, Funko Fusion, like the vinyl Pop toys the game is based on, wants to attract an older audience.
At the top level, Funko Fusion is a 3D action-platformer using the Funko Pop art aesthetic and combining a bunch of different properties–mostly Universal Pictures movies, but with additions like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Mega Man mixed in, as well. There’s an overarching story in which an evil, gooey vinyl guy named Eddie starts possessing and mutating Funko toys to turn them into monsters, but the gist is that you travel between the “worlds” of different characters, finding yourself plopped into their movies, games, or TV shows, as they’re altered because of Eddie’s influence.
I played 20 minutes of Funko Fusion at a recent Xbox Gamescom event in Los Angeles, which focused on a level based on Jurassic World. The level gave a brief glimpse of the kind of humor Funko is going for. In the opening cutscene for the level, I watched a giant, possessed dinosaur toy–the Indominus Rex from the first Jurassic World–chomp a few random vinyl park-goers and InGen corporate security guys. In the next moment, as the Funko Pop versions of Jurassic World protagonists Owen and Claire (played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in the movies) fled from the loose dinosaurs now overrunning the park, Claire got her giant Funko Pop head trapped in the closing double-doors of a gift shop. That’s a pretty good indication of the tone that developer 10:10 Games is going for.
“The major thesis of the game was, action platformers are great, people really love these types of games, and then, for no good reason whatsoever, the genre abandons them once they get to a certain age–and we can do better,” Jason Bischoff, Funko’s vice president of licensing and business development, told me in an interview.
Bischoff said the developers of Funko Fusion targeted a T rating from the start of development for a few different reasons. First, the group of people who tend to be interested in and collect Funko Pop toys skews older–there are younger people who buy them, too, but among the huge number of licensed properties represented in the toys are many that are pretty old and would generally only appeal to older fans. Second, Bischoff said, the game is full of “Itchy and Scratchy-like violence,” referencing the often-gross and over-the-top in-universe cartoon of The Simpsons, and that required a T rating. And finally, there were the particular licensed properties Funko and the game’s developers wanted to include that were often a lot more adult than one might expect for a toy-focused game.
Those properties include John Carpenter’s The Thing, the 1982 horror film that’s full of disgusting body-horror monsters. Funko and 10:10 Games released a demo for Funko Fusion on Steam that takes players into its levels based on The Thing, adding some comedy to that film’s story by converting its gross, twisted mutant monsters to the Funko aesthetic.
What’s probably the main draw of Funko Fusion, at least for people who aren’t already excited about the Funko brand, is the breadth of different properties included. Bischoff said there are 21 different properties tied into the game but hinted that there are plenty of secret characters and maybe even worlds for players to find, too. The list is as weird as it is impressive, including The Thing, Jurassic World, 1999’s The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weiss, the Jordan Peele-directed Nope, Edgar Wright’s genre comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, the 1978 Battlestar Galactica TV series, the foul-mouthed murderous possessed doll Chucky, Jaws, Back to the Future, Voltron, and Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy.
The short look at the Jurassic World level I played gave a quick sense of the moment-to-moment gameplay of Funko Fusion, especially when compared to the Steam demo. It seems you can expect, at least at the start of the world, to get mission objectives that have you exploring a large space as you gather collectibles or kill specific enemies.
In Jurassic World, the first part of the level is playing out the moment from the film in which all the dinosaurs get loose, focusing mostly on pteranodons swooping down to harass fleeing park guests. You’re let loose in the large outer area of the park, which is littered with gift shops and restaurants, with the goal of searching for and shooting five loose dilophosaurus. The spitting dinosaurs have a tendency to run when you threaten them, which can make it tough to track them all down.
At the start of the level, you can pick one of four characters–Owen, Claire, Barry, or Kayla (the latter played by Omar Sy and DeWanda Wise in the films). Each has a different main weapon and melee attack, and different capabilities, making them good at different ranges. Owen has a dodge roll and a slower-firing, more powerful rifle, for example, while Claire rolls and carries a faster assault rifle. Barry has a shotgun, but instead of a dodge roll, he gets a shield he can pull out to protect him from damage. There are puzzles in the level that require a certain character to access, and you can quickly swap to any of the other characters whenever you find a Funko Pop box.
Apart from your main goal, though, you’re also free to explore the area to solve puzzles and search for secrets, of which there are a ton. Each level has a bunch of optional objectives to find, like hidden “crown” items that are a lot like the stars of various Mario games–you’re putting them toward a larger goal that stretches across all the worlds. You can also find items that let you power up different mold machines to unlock new gear. In Funko Fusion, everything runs on vinyl, and you can earn bits of vinyl from smashing items, beating enemies, and opening treasure chests scattered everywhere. You can then spend that vinyl at mold machines to craft stuff like soda drinks that heal you or give you temporary buffs, new weapons like a grenade launcher or minigun, or environmental items like a bounce pad that can get you to locations you couldn’t otherwise reach.
Putting the focus on vinyl as the lifeblood of the game is how 10:10 Games was able to make He-Man and Mega Man fit with Shaun of the Dead and Jaws, Bischoff said, in the same way that physical Funko toys act to unify those different stories and characters. Everything in the world is made of vinyl, and that gave the developers the ability to unify cartoonish worlds with those in which a character occasionally gets dismembered, bringing both together to a funny tonal middle ground.
The demo gave me the sense that, in order to complete a few of the puzzles I ran into, I’d need to return to these worlds later when I had access to new crafting blueprints gained from other locations. And as mentioned, you sometimes need specific characters, including ones that aren’t native to that particular world. I couldn’t open a specific gold door in the Jurassic World level during the demo, but when I later played the Steam demo, I discovered how to clear it: by finding and using He-Man to knock the door down with his sword. Opening the door in The Thing world uncovered a new puzzle that required a different character to solve and was tied to the Battlestar Galactica characters. So it seems there will be lots of different ways the worlds can interact with each other, both from a story standpoint and through secrets you can unlock along the way.
You’re encouraged to use different characters, and Funko Fusion will include more than 60, but you’re not required to. If you’ve got a particular character you love, you can stick with them and the crafting system will help you make sure you don’t miss out on anything, Bischoff said.
“Let’s just say you’re the world’s biggest Orko fan,” he said, referencing the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe character. “If you want to play Orko top to tail, you can do that. The mold machines ultimately will allow you to craft the wacky weapons or other supplementary gadgets to basically backfill the special abilities that Orko does not have.”
Most of the Jurassic World demo was concerned with combat, and there were plenty of dinosaurs to fight. In addition to those five dilophosaurus and the pteranodons pestering everyone, there were points when the park was suddenly full of fast, deadly velociraptors. These guys would sometimes leap out of bushes in ambush, or come charging at you in large groups, taking a lot of fire to bring down. Staying alive can be tough, with a lot of scrambling combat that uses your dodge and shield and dumping lots of bullets into enemies to bring them down.
Apart from the dinosaurs, I also ran into InGen security teams wielding guns of their own. Approaching the Jurassic World Information Center, the passageway deeper into the park, I was attacked by a bunch of gun-wielding enemies, with a sniper on top of the building throwing down explosive grenades to make things even more hectic. There’s a lot of gunplay in the game, and despite the fact that everyone looks like a vinyl toy with a big head, you’re frequently blowing off their heads, burning off their vinyl skin, and rendering them into toy skeletons. Packing health items is essential because you’re going to take a lot of damage; the enemies in Funko Fusion are definitely coming for you.
When I finally found all five dilophosaurus, cleared the way to the Information Center, and obtained the key to open it, I was treated to a velociraptor ambush and then another of Funko Fusion’s typical puzzles. This one required powering up the door in order to exit into the next area. It requires tracing a power line from the switch back to its power source, which you need to charge up with a battery. The line itself also had breaks in it that needed fuses to complete.
The trick here was to identify different items around the room that didn’t need power and pilfer the parts from those to fix the door switch. A nearby vending machine, which you can use to nab power-ups, was powered by a battery you could snag from it–but ideally, after you’d already gotten the consumable items you needed. Fuses were also hidden around the room, powering things like neon signs and holographic dinosaur displays. Once those were plugged in, the switch opened, and I was able to race out into the next area, although I didn’t see much more before the demo ended.
What’s a little more obvious in the Steam demo, which isn’t timed, is the overall tone of Funko Fusion. That demo covers what appears to be the beginning of the game, setting up the plot in which Freddy Funko, a vinyl character who Bischoff described as “the world’s biggest fan,” a 10-year-old boy, and the newish owner of the Funko factory that produces all the toys, is attacked by his evil antithesis, Eddie Funko.
Eddie quickly possesses the first character you meet, a cute talking fox who works with Freddy, and turns him into a giant, misshapen fiend. Killing a friendly character turned into a hulking monster is a surprising start to a game like this and casts the whole experience as a goofy but self-aware and potentially dark comedy.
“Almost right out the gate when you start the title, when you meet Eddie for the first time, we knew that we wanted to give a voice to all the ‘haterade’ out there, right?” Bischoff said. “Because if Freddie is the Richie Cunningham, what is the opposite of that? Like an evil Fonz. So that’s kind of who Eddie Funko is. And literally, we have taken quotes that we’ve been hearing for years from folks that aren’t necessarily big Funko advocates, or maybe they’re Funko critics–like Eddie literally says, ‘This dead-eyed, misshapen form.’ Some of the other bigger critics and their voices, the things that they’ve said through the years, we wanted to give that stuff a voice, to pit these two ideas against one another over the course of this adventure.”
The idea of delving into different movie worlds, several of which have never been brought to games before, is the thing that interests me most when it comes to Funko Fusion. In playing both demos, though, I was surprised by the density of the game’s levels. They seem littered with small side objectives, secrets, puzzles, and Easter eggs that make them worth exploring, and I’m fascinated to see how the game will approach stories and franchises that haven’t gotten this kind of attention in the video game space before.
Funko Fusion is set to release on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 on September 13, and on Nintendo Switch and PS4 on November 15.
