#FunTime from OneGuyGames and publisher The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild makes no bones about its intent. Your sole purpose here is to have fun. In doing so, you’re going to blast an assortment of baddies in various modes and generally just attack everything that moves. Everything about #FunTime screams intensity right from the rainbow-colored title and never lets up through the course of the whole game, and once in a while, that’s all right!
If you’re thinking that there’s a distinct Geometry Wars feel here, you’re not alone. #FunTime has a noticeable look and design style that fits well in the twin-stick arena shooter genre pioneered by Geometry Wars. The dark background, the bright colors, the semi-visible grids, it all tracks. But #FunTime is its own beast too, and while there are similarities, this isn’t a derivative game. There’s no plot here, no storyline, no campaign mode at all. This is pure arcade action at its most frentic.
In #Funtime, you control a space ship. This is primarily an arena twin-stick shooter, so you simply run around the room, shooting things. However, #FunTime is divided into several different modes. The first mode on the main menu is Challenge, offering a whopping 54 stages of unique and varied challenges. The first few are straightforward and simple, but they get harder and harder as you progress and by the time you get to level 10, things are tough indeed! Each challenge has a one, two, and three star rating depending on how you do. There’s no purpose to this other than your own performance and a leaderboard system so you can compete against others, but you’ll still find yourself trying to get that third star nonetheless!
The meat of the game is hiding in Arcade mode however. Many of the levels in Challenge are versions of Arcade mode sections. Arcade has six sections, Survival, Large Survival, Open Survival, Waves, and the two locked sections, Zones and Funtime. The Survival modes are all similar. Survive as long as you can and score as many points as you can. The specifics of each vary though. Survival is in a single screen field with tight quarters and gets tough quite fast as enemies crowd the screen from all directions. Large Survival is, of course, a larger field, and Open Survival is in a borderless area filled with asteroids. Open Survival is a refreshing change from the neon borders provided by the rest of #FunTIme, but it’s also very challenging, as the asteroids are immune to your firepower and fairly dark on the screen, especially in handheld mode. You’ll most likely die frequently just from hitting asteroids while trying to dodge swaths of enemy fire and hordes of glowing enemies.
The last few modes are the most unique ones. Waves is, as you’d expect, successive waves of enemies attacking. After each wave, there’s a set of four score multipliers to gather and you regain your health. Each tenth wave is a boss fight and they’re particularly nasty. Once you gather enough points in the Arcade mode, you can spend them in the upgrade menu to boost your ship’s health, firepower, bombs, and other options, even an optional ship that follows you with supporting fire! Eventually, you’ll save up enough to unlock Color Swap, which allows access to Zones and Funtime, two of the better modes in the game. Don’t worry, as it doesn’t take all that long to save up points once you get a feel for the mechanics of the game.
Zones is a neat mode, allowing you to hide in colored zones that are impervious to enemy fire. They’re temporary though, forcing you to burst out and attack as they fade away, all while awaiting the next zone’s appearance. It is less intense than the other modes, due to the safety circles, but still quite challenging. Funtime mode is possibly the most unique mode. A giant neon wrecking ball is attached to your ship. It shifts colors occasionally and if you don’t change colors to match it, it can hit you as well. The goal is to swing it around and destroy enemies with it, but the ball has to literally be swung, meaning it’s hard to target enemies and dodge their fire while keeping the ball moving properly. It’s a challenging mode, but gratifying when you really get flying!
That brings us to the mechanics of #FunTime. As you might expect, movement is with the left stick, firing is with the right. Bombs and boosts are on the L, R, and ZL/ZR buttons. Stay in one place too long and a meteor comes down to hit you. There’s no sitting still. You can change some controller configuration in the option menu, but unfortunately, #FunTime doesn’t have true button mapping, it only swaps movement and firing (a non-starter), or bombs and boosts. It fails to address the most unique mechanic in #FunTime, the color swapping.
As you progress in the game, you’ll note that enemies are blue, red, yellow or green. With the A, B, X, and Y buttons, you can swap colors of your ship from white to any of these colors, leaving a trail of colored squares behind you as you move. Enemies that hit these die and you get triple points for it, allowing fast successive score multipliers and faster unlocking of upgrades. Unfortuantely, the comfortable default setting for firing is the right stick, meaning you’ll have to stop firing to swap colors, something that should be easy to do on the fly. #FunTime is so frantic and fast-paced however, that this allows enemies to swarm you, and since they’re constantly spawning in various colors, to effectively maximize your score, you’d have to constantly stop firing to switch colors. If color swap was mapped to a shoulder button, this would be much easier, but you can’t do that. Additionally, there’s no color key on screen, meaning that you’ll drop your hand from the fire stick in an intense fight and often hit the wrong color. It’s a great concept that’s plagued by poor execution. When it works, it’s easy to get great multipliers, but more often than not, you’ll just pick a color, leave it alone, and hope for the best.
What’s interesting about #FunTime is that each mode has different settings locked in, meaning that in some, your upgrades vanish, in others, health replenishes more easily, and so on. This keeps the modes from being unbalanced by your upgrades, especially in Challenge mode. There was a lot of care put into how each mode functions and how to balance them. In addition, visually, the game is quite spectacular, with a constant barrage of color and explosions much like a non-stop fireworks show. Unless you’re epileptic, it’s pretty darn cool, and the funky music manages to match the visuals quite well. It should be noted that the visuals are actually much better than the screens make them look. This is a fast-paced game that’s silky smooth on the Switch and looks absolutely excellent in motion. You can even swap songs with the left pad buttons on the Joycon if you’re tired of a track, certainly a welcome option.
#FunTime is a solid little arcade game with some great challenges. A story or level mode would have been very welcome here, but this is a pure old-school arcade effort with new-style graphics, physics, and design, kind of like going back to an 80s arcade and playing those old vector games like Major Havoc and Tempest. It’s tough and unforgiving, has a fair number of modes and decent replay value, but there’s nothing compelling you to keep coming back unless you just want to get a higher score or rise on the leaderboards. At $15, you’re not spending a lot though, and you’re getting a fair amount of arcade goodness for your hard-earned cash, so if you like this style of gaming, you’ll feel right at home with #FunTime. The level variety, thumping soundtrack, and quick load times make #FunTime definitely worth coming back to!
This review was based on a digital copy of #FunTime provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes. #FunTime is also available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on Steam. All screenshots are of actual gameplay, and the game is so fast, it’s damn hard to get good screenshots!
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