Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal

I have so many happy memories of when I was little, rushing home from school and throwing myself down on the living room floor to watch Looney Tunes. Back then it had a hot-in-a-sexy-librarian-way host like Suzy Cato or someone and she would introduce classic clips from the Warner Brother archives. Like Wile E. Coyote getting crushed by his own rocket or Bugs Bunny dressing up like a woman and seducing Yosemite Sam who weirdly enough couldn’t tell the difference between his own species and a rabbit. Ahhh…Good times. So I thought I would be in for a treat playing Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal.

Everything was going brilliantly until I decided to put the disk in. That’s because the cover art on the box was more or less a highlight. On the back it shows a menacing looking Will E. Coyote looking over his shoulder with hatred in his eyes. Then Bugs running around with a flame-thrower and toasting some robots. I honestly thought it would be every little kid’s ultimate game. But after 30 minutes of gameplay I realised that this was more painful than Daffy Duck in duck season.

It turns out that there is an Evil Scientist who has discovered the joys of time travel and wants to destroy the future. Straight away this sounds pretty retarded. Where’s the Scientist going to go after he succeeds? But you never have to worry about that because the gang from the Looney world are out to stop him. Throughout the game you get to play as several classic cartoon characters, including Bugs, Daffy, Taz the agro Tasmanian Devil, Marvin Martian and plenty more.

Now perhaps I’m just getting too old for this stuff, but it seemed to me that these guys aren’t as funny as they once were. All the comedic genius that was reminiscent from the cartoon show is completely absent in this game. You would be expecting all sorts of wise-cracks and commentary from these guys as they run around smashing things. Instead you get Bugs talking about steaming up his tail. Huh? Luckily some other characters do offer some entertainment but I doubt even a seven year old would crack a smile throughout most of it.

This is mainly due to the lack-lustre playability. Acme Arsenal plays like a platformer where regardless of which character you are, you will be jumping around and pummelling bad guys left, right and center. There are three types of attacks and they can be paired up fairly well for combos and even some impressive looking moves. The problem is it is just too repetitive most of the time. The name Acme Arsenal comes from the fact that there are plenty of weapons to pick up to help you pummel away. These include ray guns and even a fairly amusing boxing glove on a spring gun. But these are entertaining for an hour and soon the novelty wears off. Other aspects of the gameplay include finding buttons or switches to open doors or lower platforms. However, despite the game being for little ones, it was frustratingly difficult to realise what needed to be done. Not because the puzzles were clever or brain-taxing. Simply because these levers might be hidden behind a row of crates or off to one side of a map that you can’t even see.

It’s around this time that you notice how gammy the camera behaviour is. Sometimes jumping up boxes or doing air attacks leaves you disappearing off the screen. Even the animations are poorly executed and just standing still will show inconsistencies in the loop as your character suddenly changes position or twitches uncomfortably. It is possible the developers knew about these faults and tried to counter it by making Acme Arsenal incredibly dark. Now I don’t mean “dark” in a sense of Daffy Duck finally losing his sanity and ripping Yosemite Sam’s face clean off. I mean “dark” as in you can’t see what the hell is going on! To make matters worse, the developers didn’t even include an in-built menu to let us decide how bright we want it to be. So you have to play with the brightness and gamma settings on the TV itself. Even with everything up full it was difficult to see much detail. Switching back to normal TV lit up my entire neighbourhood thanks to my supernova-like television set.

Finally, the only real saving grace for this game is the multiplayer options. Firstly, two players can team up to attempt to get through the story in co-op mode. To be honest, having someone else there to share the torture did make it a bit more enjoyable. But what was more fun were the four player battle modes where you all compete in an arena with a variety of weapons. Definitely just a rental for a kiddies get-together. Furthermore this game isn’t very worthy for a 360 release with the graphics being marginally better than the PS2 version.