Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports: will you master the court, the pitch, or fall victim to an Acme anvil?
Ah, Looney Tunes, the cartoon that shaped many of our childhoods. When I think about slapstick comedy, the first thing that comes to mind is Bugs Bunny outsmarting his opponents, Wile E. Coyote’s rivalry with the nonchalant Road Runner, or Sylvester’s poor scrambles at trying to eat Tweety.
Even though the franchise is pushing close to a hundred years old at this point, the characters and its humor are timeless. While the ambitious inclusions of ongoing world events aren’t there anymore, given how they have made light of situations in World War and the light in the past, perhaps that is for the best.
With a slightly more lighthearted setting, we get the classic slapstick comedy along with the full cast of Looney Tunes playing sports in Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports. You can play all four sports with the gang—basketball, soccer, tennis, and golf—and all of them are playable with your friends and family through local co-op.
I recommend that you play Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports with your friends and family, for the most part, because the AI here is subpar at best. I am getting ahead of myself, though. I should familiarize you with the gameplay first.
In Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports, you get to pick from nine of the classic cast of Looney Tunes. You can play them in the Ultimate Cup Mode, Sports Mode, and Challenges.
In the Ultimate Cup mode, you can pick the number of different game modes that will be on there, and you’ll play off against each other after Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports picks one of the four sports at random.
If you pick four games before you start, you can expect to play one of each sport at least once. At the end of each game, you will be scored based on whether you won and gain extra points when you reach certain criteria during those games.
A mistake I made when I first played Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports was that I went straight into the Ultimate Cup mode because the game just throws you right in on the action. It didn’t show me any tutorial on how to play each of the sports modes, so I was pretty lost on my first go at the game.
However, Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports does prompt you to choose whether you want a tutorial when you head over to the Challenges and Sports modes. The tutorials themselves are excellent—a narrating voice guides you and shows you the ropes of each sport.
First, it starts out with a basic tutorial so you can get started, and then it asks you whether you want to see the advanced tutorial, where the game shows you certain tactics casual players may not care about.
The sports you can play are your usual implementation of golf, basketball, soccer, and tennis, but with Looney Tunes’ wacky twist. Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports still has that proud Acme branding all over it, which means trouble on the playfield.
You can pick up power-ups that can do things like speed you up, throw an anvil on the playfield (classic), or pie whoever is closest to you. You can get them from running into Acme-labeled boxes in basketball and soccer to shooting the ball into certain targets in golf and tennis.
In Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports, soccer is a little different from what you’ve seen in FIFA. It’s soccer, but it’s 4v4, and you won’t be in control of the goalkeeper; instead, you’ll swap between your three outfield players.
You can shove opponents off the ball, charge up shots, and even let rip with special, unblockable strikes once your special bar is full, which requires quick completion of a QTE sequence. These are usually unblockable if you can get them right.
The tennis mode here is pretty good. You have a charge system whereby holding the shot button when in position decides your power and angle. Of course, there are the classic Acme-style twists, including sticks of dynamite to dodge and a slow-motion special move that drains your special meter and gives you extra time to line up your shot. That’s probably not realistic, but it’s a cartoon over-the-top vibe that fits here.
Among the four sports offered in Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports, golf has to be the weakest. It has a bar on the left that determines how far you will shoot the ball and a secondary QTE to determine how precise your shot will be, but I was never able to replicate my shots perfectly from one run to the next.
The most frustrating part is how the ball tends to cling to the grass after bouncing, making slopes irrelevant. The mode also offers shortcuts that let you skip to the end of the course, but the physics makes them difficult to get consistently.
Finally, there’s basketball—arguably the most refined of the four—a very nice 2v2 game with solid mechanics. You can shove, do a high pass or ordinary pass, and shoot 2-pointers, 3-pointers, or dunks when you are close enough to the hoop. It was the most confusing when I hopped into this game mode blind, but the most rewarding when I went over the tutorial.
The coolest feature I found here was asking your teammate to prepare for an alley-oop, where you can high-pass the ball to them to perform a quick slam dunk. The Acme drops are also here, and they’re great.
It is a little weird how running into an already dropped anvil stuns you—even your own—but otherwise, basketball in Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports is great. There’s this weird pause at the end of each quarter when the horn sounds, but it’s not an issue that ruins the gameplay like the physics in golf.
If you want to play these specific sports on your own, you can try out the sports mode, where you can hop into one of these sports either alone or with friends. You can also set the difficulty of the AI you play against.
Speaking of which, the weak AI here makes playing alone not so fun. They end up making silly mistakes while being awfully particular about hitting certain precise shots, like always getting shortcuts in golf.
It can be argued that games like these are designed to play with a group first and foremost, but even then, the AI would be present if you are playing as, for example, a group of two or three. Games like Mario & Sonic at The Olympic Games and Super Mario Party are much stronger on this front.
For solo play, perhaps the most engaging mode was the Challenges mode, where you played on your own, trying to meet certain criteria set by the game. It’s a great way to get a little bit better at individual sports, though the weak AI is still there to sour the experience.
Visually, Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports looks great. The classic cast of Looney Tunes comes to life in the cel-shaded presentation very nicely. The character animations are lively, and the visual effects seen during the Acme shenanigans are well done.
In the background, you can see iconic locations like Road Runner’s Canyon or Porky’s Barn. You can also see some familiar characters in the crowds of the games, and you can hear certain quips of dialogue, too, in between quarters and half times.
Eric Bauza makes a presence here, voicing Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and he does an excellent job at making these characters sound like the classics. Sound-wise, you’ve got the iconic Looney Tunes jingles, though not much new has been done to shake things up a little.
I encountered some performance issues on my PC. Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports lagged incessantly after each loading screen before I got into the matches. However, none of these issues persisted when I was playing.
I introduced Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports to my little cousin—and despite her not being familiar with the Looney Tunes series, she had some laughs when she saw the Acme shenanigans unfold as she continuously tried to throw an anvil on my head in basketball. With the game being aimed at a younger audience, I think this game passes on that front.
Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports is a family-friendly title that does not take many risks, nor does it do much to shake up the family-oriented sports game genre. The game presents itself as merely another flavor of the sort of game that can be played when your buddies are over, and it does a solid job at that. If you are a parent thinking about getting this game for your child, this would be a solid way of introducing them to the wacky world of Looney Tunes.
