Fortnite games always feel like stepping into a bizarre dream.
It’s as if Ready Player One has come to life, where Deadpool can dance with Alien’s Xenomorph, Geralt from The Witcher, and Will Smith as Mike Lowrey from Bad Boys to NSYNC. This mashup of characters doing silly things like forming rock bands or riding cartoon trains is goofy and endlessly entertaining. The randomness of it all is part of the charm, though it can feel repetitive at times.
However, the commercial nature of these crossovers can be off-putting. Fortnite, much like Call of Duty or MultiVersus, turns beloved characters into mere products to be collected. This blending of pop culture often lacks depth and feels more like a corporate strategy than a celebration of creativity. It’s not just Fortnite; other games like Call of Duty let you play as Nikki Minaj to shoot Paul Atreides from Dune, or beat up Bugs Bunny as Batman in MultiVersus.
Adding characters like Fry and Leela from Futurama to Fortnite doesn’t bring any true essence of the show into the game. They’re just there for the sake of having familiar faces, stripped of their original context and meaning. It’s like they’re mass-produced on an assembly line.
It’s ironic that a game based on Funko Pop toys, known for their collectible nature, manages to capture some uniqueness that other IP mashups miss.
Funko Fusion, a third-person action game, stands out by blending various properties into its levels, reminiscent of the Lego games. Despite my general indifference to Funko Pops (even though I own a few cool ones like the wendigo from Hannibal and BT-7472 from Titanfall 2), I found myself drawn to this quirky game, even when it got frustrating.
Fans can sometimes get tired of all the commercial crossovers.
What makes Funko Fusion charming is its oddness. It features seven major levels based on Universal movies and TV shows, including some unexpected choices like Hot Fuzz, The Umbrella Academy, Battlestar Galactica from 1978, and John Carpenter’s The Thing, alongside more mainstream ones like Jurassic World and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.
There are hidden levels and characters to discover, referencing a variety of shows and movies. You can race against KITT from Knight Rider, fight alongside Xena from Xena: Warrior Princess, or face off against Chucky from Child’s Play and M3GAN. The game includes levels from Jaws, Shaun of the Dead, Jordan Peele’s Nope, and The Mummy from 1999. If you collect enough items, you can even play as Colonel Sanders from the fried chicken fast-food chain.
Funko Fusion’s selection of properties is both strange and detailed. The Mummy level is filled with puzzles and traps, ending in a boss fight with Arnold Vosloo’s monster. There’s also a Back to the Future scene in Hill Valley where you need to fix the DeLorean’s tires.
The interesting part about Funko Fusion is its focus on lesser-used IPs. It reminds me of the ’90s, when gaming was full of tie-in games. Back then, companies didn’t just throw characters together to create an ad; they made complete games based on movies and TV shows.
If you didn’t grow up in the ’90s, you might not get what I’m saying. Sure, tie-in games still exist, like the Lego games or Ubisoft’s Star Wars and Avatar adaptations. In 2023, I enjoyed games based on movies like Aliens: Dark Descent, RoboCop: Rogue City, and Starship Troopers: Extermination. There’s even a Harry Potter Quidditch game. But in the ’90s and early 2000s, almost everything had a video game adaptation, from Judge Dredd to Home Alone.
These games were often cash-grabs, but occasionally, you’d get gems like Enter the Matrix, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Disney’s Aladdin, and GoldenEye. Most were basic platformers or Doom clones, but some stood out as genuinely exciting games.
The fact that Funko Fusion has a whole level based on the movie Nope is cool because it reminds me of a time when a wide range of movies and TV shows were adapted into games. Sure, characters from Galactica or Hot Fuzz could appear in Fortnite, but they’d just be doing TikTok dances. Their value would be limited to “Hey, I know that character.”
I hope Funko Fusion inspires more games that delve into lesser-known licenses, exploring their stories and characters. I want more games like RoboCop: Rogue City, Starship Troopers: Extermination, and Aliens: Dark Descent. Let’s have more quirky adaptations of old movies and TV shows. I want more than just $10 skins reminding me of things I used to like.
If we’re going to live in a world dominated by corporate IP, we should at least get some interesting games out of it.
