Funk Of Titans: Can You Dig It...A Grave?

To sit and play Funk Of Titans is to sit and ask seemingly hundreds of exasperated questions about it, but the most imperative of them all what on earth is this low-rent iOS game doing on Xbox One can be answered simply by glancing at its developer’s portfolio. Funk Of Titans doesn’t even fleetingly look or feel like it belongs on a home console, and doesn’t even look as good as the iOS game that the Spanish studio behind it made previously. Stale two-button runners like this are available on the App Store by the thousand, but the fact that this purports to be “about” a specific genre of music is arguably the biggest insult of all: if ever there was a game to be played with the volume down,this is it.

There’s no funk music here whatsoever, just a gurning dope of a hero who endlessly spouts the same few aggravating jive catch phrases over and over again. There’s no Pop, Rock or Rap music either; those being the titles of each of the game’s three worlds. Here’s the skinny, daddy-o: you press A to jump and X to slash, which is a move that instantly kills the momentum that runners are supposed to inherently offer you. What’s more, all of the environments feel like they've been designed using scraps from other projects. Sometimes you’re running through what looks like a futuristic swampland, sometimes you’re in ancient Greece and sometimes you’re flying through a baby blue sky-world of hamburgers, cupcakes and floating cutlery… Nothing comes together coherently.

Backgrounds and sizeable chunks of level design are re-used to extend the experience to a paltry three hours, the boss encounters consist of six laughably simple quick-time events (some of which are just duplicates of others) and the whole thing is just downright faulty; the only saving grace being that hitting the Xbox button to bring up the dashboard menu almost always unwittingly remedies lock-ups and crashes.

Some of the levels are almost five minutes long but there are no checkpoints whatsoever, and you die after taking just two hits; which means that if you randomly take a hit early on (and that is something that can literally occur at random) the smartest response always involves suicide. That said, if your initial hit was taken in a section designed to immediately hurl you straight from one hazard into another, you’re killed on the spot, which nullifies one of the core systems of the game. That happens a lot.

Even if you could play Funk Of Titans on your phone, for free, it is so ludicrously sketchy and tedious that it would still be impossible to recommend. So on Xbox One, for the positively gaudy introductory asking price? No way, José.