Loons - The Fight for Fame

Published by Infogrames
Developed by Warthog
Platform: XBOX
Price £39.99
Released: Out Now

For me the Looney Tunes characters have always had more appeal and personality than anything Disney has come up with. Mickey Mouse always seemed to lack personality when compared with the quick thinking Bugs Bunny or the accident prone Daffy Duck. The Looney Tunes characters are far more entertaining to watch and even as an adult I still find them funny. So how does their humour translate to the XBOX? Let's take a look at Loons - The Fight for Fame.

The easiest way to describe Loons is probably to call it a Super Smash Bros. Melee alike. Choosing to play as either Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester or Taz (Tasmanian Devil) this is one big Looney Tunes beat 'em upathon. The game contains 15 fighting levels, 7 mini-games and a host of bonuses for you to unlock.

The story behind the game is that two rather sneaky individuals, Rocky and Mugsy have just been made executive producers for a Hollywood production. What they plan to do is to make the worst film possible, run the film studio into the ground and buy up the stock for the film studio at a very cheap price. In order to bring about this planned disaster the two decide to use the small talents of Yosemite Sam as director and also enlist the worst actors possible, i.e. Daffy, Bugs, Sylvester and Taz. Each of the 15 levels in the single player game are sets from the film. Each of the 15 levels is sort of a scripted beat 'em up that promises a lot of fun. However when it comes to actual gameplay the promise is definitely unfulfilled.

Basically the whole thing gets very messy, very quickly. All too often it is just impossible to follow what is going on. Orders are given verbally that tell you to open doors or perform other such actions but these are not subtitled and anyway even if you don't carry them out it seems to make little difference as the goal is just simply to finish off your opponents with the aid of power-ups etc. The camera feels too far away from the action and more often than not you will feel like giving up rather than persevering with the game. Comments are made from the characters and some of these comments are subtitled and some are not but again the relevance of these comments is questionable, however it adds extra Looney Tunes ambience to the game for hearing gamers that deaf gamers will simply miss out on, but doesn't have any effect on the gameplay.

During the 15 missions, this part of the game is known as Fight for Fame by the way, you'll also unlock 7 arcade mini-games and special features. To be perfectly honest these extra features are nothing to get wildly excited about especially as some are extra music and therefore useless for the deaf gamer. Multiplayer is OK but nothing special which is a shame because games like this should be fantastic as a multiplayer experience and to be honest you could live with a poor single player experience if the multiplayer aspect was upto scratch.

Graphically the game looks good. It looks kind of cel-shaded but traditionally cel-shaded graphics appear 2D and flat but the graphics in Loons are definitely not 2D in appearance. There are some nice graphical touches in Loons such as ghostly flying chairs etc. but on the whole the graphics are not as great as you would expect from an XBOX game.

Loons is one of those games you just know could have been so much more. It should have concentrated on an improved multiplayer game, instead of throwing in a substandard single player section. In short there isn't much here to please the average gamer, which is a real shame.

Overall Game Rating: 4.2/10 While it isn't completely horrible it's fair to say that it is a big disappointment.

Deaf Gamers comment: Subtitling is patchy and there is a lot that is missed out.