Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal finds you stepping into the shoes of many of WB's most popular cartoon characters, and using a typically wacky array of weaponry to "blam!" and "fwap!" against enemies.

According to the story, a mysterious evil genius scientist is using time travel to try and take out the ancestors of the Looney Tunes. So Bugs and company load up with their zaniest and best hardware, and venture back in time to stop said evil genius in his tracks. Playable characters include favorites like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, Tasmanian Devil, Gossamer, and a surprise I won't spoil here.

The ingredients sound like a recipe for madcap success, right? If only. While it offers a few hours of hairbrained fun, Acme Arsenal turns out to be far less than the sum of its parts.

Much of the game is filled with typical console button-mashing, without any real need for putting thought into what you're doing. Jump, double-jump, smash, whack, fire. There are some enemy classes that that only respond to one specific type of attack, but for the most part, tactics aren't a priority for the player. The usual jumping games are also included, and while some of them have some real ingenuity, forcing you to think about what you're doing before you do it, others seem to have little if any thought behind them at all.

Unfortunately, the characters you play as are pre-chosen for you, based on the level you select. I understand this from a storytelling point of view, but it would have been fun to play through the whole game as my favorite character. I also missed the presence of several Looney Tunes standards as playable characters; Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, Porky the Pig, Yosemite Sam, and Wile E. Coyote could have been a blast, offering more diverse forms of combat.

The co-op mode carries more than its fair share of bugs. Inexplicably, the screen is split vertically in co-op, rather than the more standard horizontal split. Acme Arsenal is hardly the first game to do it this way, but the composition of the game makes your screen so slender and tall (except, one supposes, on widescreen TVs), it's all but impossible to see anything in your immediate vicinity, including your objectives, enemies, and your co-op partner. We spent lots of time spinning around in circles, trying to locate the source of enemies that were firing at us, or just trying to spot each other.

One other irritant: if you die while in co-op mode, your partner has to keep playing without you until a checkpoint is reached. This isn't all that different in theory than the co-op mode in Halo, for example, but in Acme Arsenal, the checkpoints aren't nearly as well spaced out (some come immediately one after the other in adjacent rooms, while others are spread across ridiculously long distances), so you're frequently forced to sit and watch your partner play solo, and this can last anywhere between sixty seconds and sixty minutes. This becomes especially counter-productive and just plain irksome when the solo player is up against a difficult obstacle or a puzzle that's clearly meant to be solved by two players instead of one.

On the plus side, the Looney Tunes characters all act and sound like the crazy creations of Mel Blanc that we all grew up on. The graphics aren't bad, either, managing to pull off the harder-than-it-sounds task of creating a believable cartoon world that's three-dimensional, yet still feels like a cartoon. I particularly enjoyed the inspired Mars level, which brings to life the gloriously bizarre floating-in-space red platforms of Marvin the Martian's homeworld for you to explore.

The voice actors do a decent job of representing the late great Blanc, but I did find myself a bit nostalgic for his classic voice work on several occasions. The game's music will satisfy undiscriminating players, but I found it repetitive enough to warrant turning off under the options menu.

One thing I greatly enjoyed is the handful of special racing levels that are scattered throughout the game. These levels significantly up the ante on suspense and thrills by placing you on a timer, where you have to drive or fly your way through various obstacles, enemies, and power-ups on some surprisingly well-rounded obstacle courses. Multiple paths are usually available, but all roads lead to the end, and you can fire some whoppingly powerful weapons while you're chugging along at a breakneck pace. The race to beat the clock and get a high score is an old tool of video game makers, but when done as well as it is here, it still works.

If only the whole game could have been equally compelling. But for the bargain price Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal sells for, it should have no trouble providing six to eight hours of solid entertainment to kids and grown-ups alike.

Comments (0)