Funko Fusion Hands-on Preview – Put your heads together

First announced earlier this year, we finally have been able to get a hands-on look at Funko Fusion, 10:10 Games’ Funko Pop-flavoured action puzzler. With the game being developed by many ex-Traveler’s Tales developers who have worked on the LEGO adaptation games over the years, it was illuminating to see how Funko Fusion continues that legacy while also bringing its own spin to the formula. While the tight scope of the demo left much more to be revealed later on, what I was able to play makes me cautiously optimistic to find out more.

Starting in the Wonderworks Toy Factory, the game’s hub area, you pick which character from which franchise you would like to start off. The finished game will feature over 60 characters from 20 licensed settings. This demo, however, only showed off the Jurassic World and Hot Fuzz levels. After a short but quite enjoyable boss fight against Funko Fusion’s main antagonist, Eddy Funko, you must go through levels based on scenes from the licensed properties, while combatting Eddy’s corruption and collecting gold and silver crowns, which can be used to unlock more content.

Each level in Funko Fusion is bookended by charming little Funko Pop recreations of scenes from the movies, complete with added slapstick. I adored these little skits, complete with funny gags built around characters jamming doors open with their giant Funko noggins or dramatic reveals communicated entirely via mime. It did make the scenes adapting Jurassic World: Dominion, a movie I have not seen, a little hard to follow, but I’m not here for an accurate retelling of the movie plots and neither are you.

There were plenty of other adorable little flourishes inspired by the Funko Pop theme. I was a particular fan of character switching being done by characters jumping in and out of their iconic Funko Pop packaging, with the packages having all the little details on them that collectors would expect. The way that player characters would steadily become dirtier, scuffed up and then skeletal as they took damage was another appreciated touch, as it made it easy to track when I was taking damage without having to pay close attention to my health bar.

The first thing that becomes apparent is that the combat feels a bit more complex than what is usually featured in the LEGO games. Each character, from the ex-Navy dinosaur trainer Owen Grady to Sandford police officer Danny Butterman, has both melee and ranged attack options. Taking on board the combat improvements found in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, the player can manually aim characters’ ranged weapons to target enemy weak spots, a tactic required to defeat many of the game’s boss fights.

Unfortunately, it maintains some of the LEGO games’ more annoying traits, chiefly infinitely respawning random enemies. Foes aren’t very hard to defeat in most cases; with the massive craniums of Funko Pop characters, you must be trying to miss to avoid landing headshots with your ranged weapons. However, it became irritating when enemies swarmed or continued attacking me when I was trying to focus on solving a puzzle. Fortunately, failure merely costs a small portion of your accumulated Mould (the resource used to purchase healing items and tools), preventing it from becoming too frustrating.

Puzzles work a little differently in Funko Fusion compared to the LEGO games. I’m not sure this demo showed off the game’s unique qualities as well as it could have done. There is a focus on using objects found in the environment or purchased from Mould Machines, such as bounce pads, crime scene analysers and chargeable batteries, to find clues and open up new areas, rather than the characters themselves having inherent skills or unique abilities. Each franchise’s set of levels lets you play as one of four characters from that setting, with more to be unlocked later on.

Levels tend to be more open in Funko Fusion than in your typical LEGO game as well. With many levels requiring the player to find a certain number of collectables or defeat a certain number of unique minibosses, a map screen to help prevent player disorientation would have been appreciated. Particularly due to the kind of samey Funko Pop character designs of the NPCs, I found myself more than once becoming a bit lost in the Jurassic World levels particularly when trying to track down the level objectives.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have fun with Funko Fusion; while the developers’ pedigree from the LEGO games at Traveller’s Tales is felt, Funko Fusion definitely feels like its own creation. The Funko Pop-inspired comedy in the cutscenes was funny and charming, and I’m looking forward to the game’s take on the other classic films and TV shows that it is adapting. That said, the focus on items to solve puzzles rather than character-exclusive abilities does make each character feel a bit less unique, which for a game based around celebrating these iconic characters and stories, may be disappointing depending on how the full game fleshes out these mechanics.

At any rate, we will find out more when Funko Fusion releases next month on September 13th 2024 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.