Funko Fusion - Bob Ross Pack

I'll be straight with you: I'm not the primary audience for Funko Fusion, and that's fine. But I've been around long enough to know when a DLC pack is a genuine value add versus a cosmetic skin with a famous face bolted on. The Bob Ross Pack is the second type. It drops the legendary painter and TV personality into Funko Fusion as a playable character, plus one alternate outfit variant, and that's the entirety of what you're buying. No new world, no new mechanics, no new weapons tied to paintbrushes or happy little trees. Just Bob Ross walking around levels designed for other franchises. The base game, developed by 10:10 Games, is made up of former Traveller's Tales LEGO developers and carries all of that DNA. You're fighting enemies, smashing objects for gems, collecting crowns to unlock worlds, and backtracking through levels to grab collectibles you missed the first time around. The combat is a third-person mix of melee and shooting with no real weight behind the hits. Critics across the board flagged floaty, unsatisfying combat, relentless enemy spawns, and a near-total absence of a tutorial as the base game's core headaches. OpenCritic aggregated 64 critics and landed on an average score of 53, rating it 'Weak' and placing it in the bottom 8 percent of reviewed games. That's not a number you paper over with a DLC character. To be fair, the base game does have a pull for a specific type of player. If you're a completionist who needs to tick every box in every level, Funko Fusion delivers a substantial pile of collectibles and over twenty licensed franchises, from Jurassic World to Hot Fuzz to Masters of the Universe. The worlds themselves are visually competent, each one replicating the aesthetic of its source material with some care. Online co-op also rolled out post-launch, beginning with the Jurassic World levels, so at least playing with a friend is now possible for parts of the game. But there's no Free Play mode, so revisiting levels to clean up missed collectibles means replaying from the start, cutscene and all, with shortcuts and unlocked doors reset. That design choice alone would drive anyone impatient out of the room. The Bob Ross Pack was priced at $4.99 at launch. What you get is purely cosmetic in practice: the same combat, the same worlds, just with the wholesome guy in the afro and the painting kit rendered in Funko vinyl. If you already own the base game and Bob Ross is a specific attachment for you, the novelty is harmless. If you're trying to use this pack as a reason to jump into Funko Fusion for the first time, skip it and judge the base game on its own merits first, which are uneven at best. The ceiling on this kind of character-only DLC is always going to be low, and Bob Ross, warm as the association is, can't raise it. Fred, Scout Team