Funtasia

I came into Funtasia expecting a scrappy side-scrolling racer with some local co-op teeth. What I got was a Hill Climb Racing clone dressed in an acid-trip art style, sitting at 54% positive on Steam with just over 60 reviews. That number tells you something, and the community discourse confirms it: this game is divisive for very specific, repeatable reasons. The core loop is three buttons - gas, brake, and a tilt correction that barely registers in practice. You race across 10 tracks in one of 40 vehicles, each with its own physics quirks, hitting hills, quicksand, caves, and cliffs while a depleting battery counts down your run. Each track closes with a boss fight, and those are legitimately the most interesting part of the game. The bosses are weird, creative, and actually push back. The problem is everything between you and them. Vehicles start deliberately underpowered, so your first attempt at any track is effectively a scouting run you are guaranteed to fail. You collect what you can, die, upgrade, try again, get slightly further, die again. Players who grew up on Earn to Die or the original Hill Climb Racing will recognize this structure and probably tolerate it. Players coming in expecting a physics-based racing game with actual momentum and reaction-based skill expression will bounce off inside an hour. The art is the one thing nobody argues about. Italian artist Emanuele Olives built the visual world here, pulling from Adventure Time's color logic and something closer to Troma's anything-goes weirdness. The result is genuinely striking, and the hand-drawn character designs on both the vehicles and bosses have more personality than most indie games manage in their entire runtime. The music sits in the background without offending anyone, which is about the ceiling of praise it earned from the community. Where the presentation falls apart is in the moment-to-moment feedback. The physics feel mushy, the balance mechanic has almost no tactile response, and there are reports of broken achievements that have gone unfixed since launch. For a game where the replay hook is maxing out every car, a broken achievement is not a minor inconvenience. Co-op is available locally for two players, and there is a Challenge mode for head-to-head play. Online leaderboards exist for time chasers. But if you are evaluating this as a multiplayer experience, manage expectations: the active player base is thin, and the competitive ceiling is low when the core driving inputs are this simple. This is couch game territory, best served in short sessions with someone who will laugh at the boss designs rather than someone hunting ranked progression. Solo, the repetitive upgrade-gating wears out its welcome faster than the track count suggests it should. Worth a look if it lands in a bundle or at a steep discount. Otherwise, Hill Climb Racing 2 on mobile scratches the same itch for free.

Fred · Scout Team

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