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The Evil Mad Scientist is fed up with the Looney Tunes and plans to get rid of them once and for all. Using his homemade time machine and giant ACME eraser, he will travel through time and erase the Looney Tunes and their ancestors from existance.Little does he know though that the Looney Tunes have built their own time machine, and will fight the Evil Mad Scientist to save themselves from dissapearing.

Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal is an action-adventure game featuring seven playable Looney Tunes characters, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tazmanian Devil, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Gossamer and a special secret character, all rendered in high-definition, next-generation graphics. Gamers find themselves immersed in combat, puzzles, and vehicle-based action. Players also command an arsenal of ACME melee and projectile weapons in outrageous battles and travel to various locations such as Camelot, Ancient Egypt, Mars, and the Wild West.

Genre: Action Adventure

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive

Developer: Red Tribe

Online Play:

Local Play: 2 Co-op

November 1, 2007 –
As a kid, I spent my Saturday mornings watching Looney Tunes. When it came time for the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner segments, my sister would leave the room, no doubt bored with the hopelessness of their ever-cycling violent encounters. I, however, loved every minute of it.

My most sincere wish at the age of 10 was that I would somehow come into possession of an ACME catalog, from which I would order all manner of explosives, booby traps, surveillance gear and disguises. Sadly, such a windfall never came to pass, and I grew up jaded and cynical, my face permanently twisted in a hateful snarl.

Warner Bros. must be aware of the irresistible pull the Looney Tunes and ACME names exert, because they slapped both on the box of their latest licensed game. With Looney Tunes: ACME Arsenal, Warner would seem to be offering gamers and cartoon fans the perfect opportunity to live out their dream of using their favorite Looney Tunes characters to deploy crate after zany crate of outrageous weapons and devices. Instead, Warner and developer Red Tribe delivered a mediocre, derivative 3D platformer that offers little more than a gimmick, some mildly amusing writing and a few hours of mindless brawling.

Blech.

I played through Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal on the Xbox 360 and then tried the PS2 and Wii versions. The PS2 game looks and plays almost exactly the same as the 360 version, and the camera controls are actually somewhat better. But the Wii version of AA is nearly unplayable, making it one of the worst gaming experiences I’ve had in a very long time.

The premise of Looney Tunes: ACME Aresenal is that the evil scientist Dr. Frankenbeans, his hatred for Bugs and friends having reached the boiling point, has decided to send an army of killer robots after their ancestors.

Your job is to rescue your long-lost relatives and stop the evil Dr. by battling your way through said robots in Egypt, Camelot, etc., while collecting coins and glowing green tubes of Illudium Q-37, which are scattered throughout the game. The latter upgrades your melee weapon (Bugs’ guitar, Marvin the Martian’s swords, Foghorn Leghorn’s fists), and the former lets you add to your “arsenal” via weapon-vending machines.

Unfortunately, that arsenal is pretty darn thin. Aside from a spring-loaded boxing glove gun and a bear-trap-launching gun, most of the weapons in AA are disappointingly standard (freeze gun, shotgun, grenade launcher, etc.) and they’re just not that fun to use. Not that it matters much. The targeting system is so clunky and cumbersome that I found myself giving up on the weapons and instead using standard melee attacks to complete most of every level — not a good sign for a game with “arsenal” in the title.

Not nearly as cool as you think

When you’re not busy trying in vain to have fun with the weapons in AA, you’ll probably find yourself battling the game’s erratic camera, which can make some of AA’s jumping puzzles incredibly maddening – not for their inherent difficulty but because you’ll find yourself being forced to leap blindly at times, often to your death.

But death is a relative term in AA. If you fall off a cliff or lose all your health to enemy blows, you can take control of your computer-chosen secondary character until they, too, bite it. At that point, the game will reload you at your last checkpoint (they’re liberally spread throughout the game). I never lost more than five minutes of ground in the handful of times I died playing AA (usually from falling off a cliff while wrestling with the camera controls).

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