Looney Tunes Wacky World of Sports - Review

Growing up, I spent a lot of Saturday mornings watching re-runs of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons and then newer shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and of course Space Jam. When Warner Bros. started to release the classic shorts in collections, I started to pick them up and now with over 20 hours of shorts in my library and countless fond memories of shows and movies, you could say I am a fan. That love of the characters has often translated to videogames, with 2007’s Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck being a personal favourite, but it has been nearly 10 years since the last non-mobile game staring the iconic characters and their return is not good.

Ok, so let me get this out of the way first, Looney Tunes Wacky World of Sports is not a good game, its not a hot pile of garbage, but the number of games worse than this is much smaller than the number of games better that it. So what exactly is bad about the game, lets begin with the gameplay as that is the real meat of the game and its not so bad here, but it ain’t good either. The game includes four sports, Golf, Tennis, Basketball and Soccer and each has a different arrangement of players, like 2v2 or 1v1 in tennis. The mechanics of each sport are solid, in tennis you have different shots like lob and top spin, whereas in soccer you can slide tackle the ball out from under your opponent. Those coming in and expecting the same level of control as either 2K’s NBA series or EA Sports FC series are going to be very let down, heck even expecting some of the options found in the Nintendo themed sports games might be let down. Golf as an example lets you choose a club, aim for a spot on the course and then choose the power, there is no spin control to be found, but even without that, it is the most entertaining of the bunch. The games all sport (pun intended) quarters and timers like you would find in the real game, but the amount of control there is limited, so you just have to deal with whatever it tells you, thankfully golf does not have a time restriction.

With that said there are some levels of control over each game, depending on which character you choose to play as. Each character falls into a group such as speed and within each group are different characters, Lola Bunny is more of a speedy character, like Sylvester and Road Runner, but strangely enough no Speedy Gonzales. In a game like golf, speed is less important compared to strength, but you might argue differently. Taking a brute character into soccer will give you a strength advantage, but a speedy character might run away with the ball faster, so it’s a trade off and I do appreciate that. Sadly the customisation ends there, your character has no levels or skills to unlock, they are the same characters each and every time you play as them, which is a shame, more so given the ACME Cup you can play towards. The cup has you play through all four sports, in a random order and you earn points for winning or doing certain things between matches and the end result is the winner gets the golden anvil. When I did my first run through this mode, I opted for the medium difficulty, because I figured it was a fair balance to test my skills against, I won with nearly 20 points between me and second place. Doing it again on hard brought that down to 15 points, but it was still far too much and while I wanted to see just how big the gap would be on easy, I really didn’t want to play through again, even though I would unlock more locations to play in, because the AI is busted.

Each sport has a number of in-game hazards you can make use of, most of the times it relates to items, like pies in faces or anvils dropping from the sky, but your character also has a power move they can do. Those shots are interesting as they often can give you an advantage, but the AI also has access to them as well, and they use them as soon as they can. Where the broken aspects come in is with how much they swing between mediocre and genius levels, golf being a prime example. The number of times I saw the AI take a shot, only to miss time the power meter and then fall short or just yeet the ball off course was insane, but then on the next shot they just hit perfect each time. That is not like a lucky shot, but rather perfect power, perfect placement and even using some hidden shortcuts that the courses have, everything was just perfect. When I played tennis, if I played in 2v2 mode, with the AI controlling the other player, it was very rare for me to get in any shots as they were all over the court. Now normally that might be funny, but there were too many times to count where they were so broken they would just stand there and watch the ball bounce past them, the problem is that you never knew if they were going to do that, thankfully it also happened to the opponents side as well. Now if you are playing without a lot of AI, either playing with limited AI in golf or with friends in multiplayer, then its going to be a different story but anything less than 4 human players, is likely going to invoke the AI and that will not be fun.

Another aspect of the game that is not fun are the visuals, at least on Switch, the game looks kinda ugly. The characters thankfully sport the more iconic look that people have known for almost 100 years, so I give the game credit for that, but beyond that the rest looks bad. Ok, so Switch is not the most powerful of consoles, but when you consider that the game is going for a stylised look, it should be ok, but that is not the case. Loading into a golf course, the game fades out the background very quickly, characters and props are also treated like this. Basketball should be easier, given it’s a small court, but nope it has similar issues regarding the background characters that are cheering on their team. Let us not forget to mention that the number of background characters are limited, so they repeat a lot or that they lack decent animations, so they are often all doing the same motion. All of that could be forgiven if the actual player characters were entertaining and they are not, they have the same opening animations each time they appear, Bugs burrows into the shot each time for example. When your characters makes a bad swing in golf, or misses a shot in basketball, they also do the same anger/disappointment animation, so get used to seeing that a lot. When you trigger a power move, the animation that plays out does achieve the right vibe for each of the characters, but that is one positive amongst a sea of negative. The games locations are fine, they are not going to be super familiar to casual fans of the characters, but they do at least look the part. Screens from the other versions don’t look as bad, but its still not the prettiest looking game there either, but worse than the visuals is the audio.

Now I will say that the games audio is given a massive boost by the fact that Eric Bauza, Kath Soucie, Jim Cummings, Jeff Bergman and Fred Tatasciore are all present and voicing the characters they have been doing for a while now. While Bauza has been doing Marvin the Martian for years, he has only recently been doing Bugs and Daffy and for the most part they are fine, however his Elmer is horrible, but as Warner Bros insist on having as few actors as possible voicing the characters, that is unlikely to change. All the actors do a great job, minus Elmer, the problem is that they don’t have enough dialogue recorded so you will hear the same lines over and over and over again. When your character gets angry, you hear the same line, when they win you get the same line and even the credits, the lines in the credits repeat many times, they just don’t have enough to say. Sadly it gets worse as the game seems to only have one music track, that is not true they have some different music for when you are playing, but the intro to every sport and in each golf course is the same piece of music. It also plays in the menus; it also plays when you are going through the ACME cup game selection and of course it plays everywhere else they can get away with it. While I do like the Looney Tunes version of The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, I like it as the opening to a short, not basically stuck on repeat. If all that was not enough, the game also suffers from weird audio issues where characters don’t have sound effects and background characters make no noise, which really dampens any fun you may have built up.

If you are like me and love the Looney Tunes, then I can only suggest that you pick up Wacky World of Sports if you will be playing the game with friends, as solo its not worth it. If you do have mates you can’t wait to play with, then I suggest another platform other than Switch, the visuals and load times make it a no go. But if you are someone who generally plays on thier own, then make sure you take that left turn at Albuquerque, because you will want to avoid it. The game offers up sports that are functional, but there is not a lot of replay value here, outside of golf and while the challenges are ok, they are not going to be the reason to get the game. With a strong licence like the Looney Tunes, I was hoping for more and in the end there is nothing merry about this melody.

The Score

6.0

Review code provided by Gamemill Entertainment

The Pros

Golf is basic but a serviceable game and you can sink some time into it

The characters looking as they should is a real plus given of some of the recent mobile games…

The Cons

… but the overall visual polish on Switch is woeful, coupled with long load times; it’s not good

The games AI is all over the place and makes it hard to play solo at the best of times