Reviews
I think it’s fair to say that most of us will have some fond childhood memories of the Looney Tunes characters gracing our screens on Saturday mornings. Bugs would be dishing out some sort of comeuppance to an unsavoury character while sometimes dressed as a lady bunny, or watching Wiley Coyote fail time and time again to catch the Road Runner with an endless arsenal of ACME weaponry. So it is with this nostalgic frame of mind that I first picked up Red Tribes offering, Looney Tunes: ACME Arsenal. This is a 3rd person game where you get to play as different Looney Tunes characters such as Bugs, Daffy, Marvin the Martian, Foghorn Leghorn and Taz to name a few. Looney Tunes: ACME Arsenal will be a huge draw to kids and cartoon fans alike, but is this title worthy of such attention? Will this ACME rocket even get off the ground?
Looney Tunes: ACME Arsenal is a 3D platform style game that is unfortunately fraught with issues, and you encounter these very early in the game. When you start to play Looney Tunes: ACME Arsenal, you are first greeted with a bland menu system with minimal options presented to you. From here you must complete the tutorial before you can start playing the game proper, and it is here that you are introduced to some of the major annoyances of the game. The Y-axis is inverted, and you must change this in the game options. Not a problem I hear you say, except that the game doesn’t save option changes. You must make this change every time you boot up. What’s more, the tutorial has no speech or any real guide to take you through it. You have tasks to complete by pressing buttons highlighted on the screen, and once you do that you can advance onto the next room. Its barely even minimalist and unfortunately does set the tone for the game.
Once through the tutorial you get your teeth into the main single player campaign in which a mad scientist has developed a time machine which he used to send his robot army back in time to eliminate the Looney Tunes. Bugs Bunny learns of this and goes back in time with his friends to put a stop to the mad scientist’s dastardly deeds. All of the levels are based on a different theme and all largely involves your character platforming their way to switches or buttons and battling evil robots using animated martial arts techniques or using one of the 15 ACME weapons available to you. It all sounds fine on paper, but it doesn’t work in practice. Poor programming and an apparent non-existent QA process makes playing this game more of a chore than a charm. There are a couple of racing levels to break up the monotony, but they are no less disappointing. The humour you would expect from the Looney Tunes license is nowhere to be seen or heard. Battling baddies gets pretty tedious very early on as the guys you battle never change, and the manner in which you dispatch them becomes equally dull. You would expect the inclusion of the ACME arsenal to add variety, but it doesn’t. This too becomes drudgery as all the weapons do pretty much the same thing, namely a ranged attack. You don’t get any of the whacky ACME weaponry that helped make Looney Tunes what it was. To make matters worse, the seemingly endless button pushing and switch flicking wears thin after the first level and it carries on throughout the game.
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