Fix a van with eight players while a tornado flattens the city behind you. Co-op survival is overflowing, but Funnel Runners has a hook that blows you away. We see real potential.
Alexandrosse
InsertCoins.press Score
6/10
Verdict
Mixed
Let's be honest, co-op survival and horror is starting to make us roll our eyes. Every week brings its band of four friends exploring a dangerous place while screaming into a mic, and the formula is spinning its wheels. So why did Funnel Runners hook us? Maybe because we rewatched Twisters last week and had tornadoes on the brain. But above all because, for once, the threat isn't one more monster: it's a column of air at a thousand miles an hour barreling straight at you.
Funnel Runners is a first-person co-op survival game developed by Supernova Studios, available since 16 July 2026 on PC. The principle is clear and effective: trapped in a doomed city, you and up to seven friends must comb the rubble for parts, fix your van, and flee the brutal tornado that approaches. The game bets on disasters that escalate in intensity and on total environmental destruction, which places it in the great family of co-op survival, but with a climatic identity that immediately sets it apart from the pack of team horror games.
Where the genre often settles for a static threat that prowls, Funnel Runners imposes a moving, relentless threat: the tornado itself. All the game's tension is born from that race against the clock and against the wind. You scatter to gather the parts needed to fix the van, you communicate to coordinate, and you keep a constant eye on the horizon where the black column swells. It's a simple but fearsomely effective loop: the longer you take, the closer the danger, and the collective panic when the tornado finally enters the frame is worth all the jump scares in the world.
Total environmental destruction is the game's real technical asset, and it directly serves the gameplay. Seeing the city literally torn apart around you, the buildings collapsing, the debris flying, gives the threat a physical presence few games in the genre reach. You don't flee an abstract concept, you flee a cataclysm you watch destroy the scenery in real time. Playable up to eight, with its disasters that chain and worsen, Funnel Runners turns co-op survival into an interactive disaster film, and the idea is excellent.
What Funnel Runners brings most to the genre is thus a strong thematic hook and a dynamic threat that renew a worn formula. Where a thousand co-op horror games ask you to avoid an entity, this one asks you to beat a natural phenomenon, and that simple change in the nature of the danger is enough to revive interest. The eight-player co-op, wider than the classic square of four, adds to the chaos a dimension of panicked crowd that fits the disaster-film fantasy perfectly. On the concept, the game holds a real good idea.
Still, potential isn't yet total success, and you have to stay lucid. A game of this type lives or dies on the variety of its situations and the solidity of its execution, and that's where its future will play out. Repetition looms: how many times can you fix a van before routine sets in, despite the beauty of the chaos? The richness of the disasters, the depth of the maps and the health of its community will determine whether Funnel Runners stays a curiosity or becomes a co-op staple. For now, you're holding an appealing promise more than a definitive achievement.
Funnel Runners is the good surprise of a genre we thought exhausted. By replacing the umpteenth monster with a devastating tornado, it gives co-op survival its breath back, literally. The race to fix the van before the cataclysm arrives, the spectacular environmental destruction and the chaos of an eight-player team in a panic make for moments of rare intensity, recalling the best of the disaster film. If you love the genre despite its saturation, or if Twisters made you want to run in front of a tornado, there's an experience here that blows you away.
You just have to approach it with the lucidity its status demands. It's a brilliant concept that needs to prove itself over time, whose longevity will depend on its ability to vary its situations and avoid repetition. The potential leaps off the screen, the execution is promising, but it's still a bet on the future. We see a solid base and a real idea, which, in the run-of-the-mill of co-op survival, is already a lot. We keep an eye wide open on what comes next.
A co-op survival that trades the monster for a devastating tornado, and finds its breath again in a saturated genre: a brilliant hook and spectacular chaos, whose longevity remains to be confirmed.
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Tested on PC.
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