Mario and Sonic may not have showed up for the Paris Olympics, but the Looney Tunes characters are ready to duke it out in all sorts of sports, albeit not with an Olympic theme. Here’s our Xbox Series X review for Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports!
Looney Sports
One of the evergreen tropes in gaming: slapping popular characters from behemoth IPs into some sort of competition – be it a fighting tournament, a karting championship, a sports cup and so forth. Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports falls into the latter camp, as it pits various iconic characters from the Looney Tunes cartoons, most of which having been around since before, statistically, your and our parents were even born.
It’s the simplest of formulas, really: in various power-up infused sports events, our roster competes in rounds of tennis (both solos and duos), football (or soccer, if you’re in US), golf and basketball. The 9 characters available include cartoon legends like Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Taz and more, in events organized by ACME themselves, which surely you remember from the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoons – whose two protagonists are also playable here.
The game can be played solo or locally up to 4 players, with sadly no online multiplayer to boot. Remaning slots can be filled up with AIs, rocking 4 different skill levels. Players can either participate in a tournament, where sports and teams are paired up randomly and the rules are fixed, or play the sport of their liking with customizeable rulesets and player settings. Solo players do get a bit of extra content in the form of Challenges, which we’ll dig into later.
Hunting season
Anyone’s first foray into this wacky sports game should either be the custom matches, where the game gently offers you to play the tutorial for each sport first, or diving into said playable explanations from the main menu itself. Here, quick and very easy to understand playable scenarios explain the ins and outs of each sports, with all their controls, wacky mechanics, power-ups and more to tackle.
Definitely do not go straight into the tournaments first, as there is no tutorial there, and the game doesn’t really offer much in terms of tips at that point. One of the game’s strengths, is that each game mode is mechanically quite simple, relying on not that many buttons or advanced trickery. Yet, a few sports like golf and tennis, do feature a surprising amount of depth and variety – but we’ll dig into the individual events in a bit.
Let’s assume you got through all the tutorials for the sport you wanna try. You selected the players, be it real life buddies or AI foes. Everyone chose their character, chose whether they are left or right-handed (it matters for tennis and golf), customized their attire, team colours and so forth. Let’s see, what sport should we begin with? Hmm… let’s go with basketball, shall we?
Don’t quit before it’s over
Looney Tunes characters playing basketball? Now where did I see this one before? Anyway, the depth or mechanical complexity is certainly no NBA 2K, but it gets the job done. Two players versus two, players get to alternate low or high passes, dribble without any real limitations of sorts, then be able to throw with a simple button-holding mechanic, or even dunking from right under the ring – in which case, it’s automated with a single button press. Even scoring 3-pointers is quite easy, though there’s tackles, ball-stealing and so forth.
As with other sports, there’s Mario Kart-esque power-ups involved, that can change a character’s speed, stun an enemy and so forth – with each sport having its unique set of items that can (optionally) spice up the fights. There’s even a “super” bar that slowly fills, which then can eventually be used to either score a spectacular, specially animated dunk from a longer distance, or to block an otherwise seemingly unblockable attack. You’ll see that variations of this “super” skill will be usable in every other sport.
In football/soccer, it allows again for a special, unsaveable shot if the player hits the correct buttons in a short QTE sequence. In tennis, it lets the player shoot a crazy powerful shot that is nearly impossible to save, but it can also be used in bits and pieces for a slow motion mode. Lastly, in golf, again it allows the player to do a particularly powerful shot, with yet another funny character-specific animation to boot.
The ball life
Moving over to football, or soccer for the US population, it’s again a very simple formula, with most of the buttons acting in a similar way to basketball. Players here get an extra couple skills like sprinting and dodges, which come in handy against the tackles and dives by opponents. Other than that, it is mostly the same – a simplified, near-automated pass and shoot system, with in this case the keepers of these 3 versus 3 fights being controlled by the AI.
Moving over to something drastically different, is tennis. Taking cues from other mascot tennis games, such as Mario’s or SEGA’s titles, once again the players can tackle a simplified, yet somewhat deep recreation of arcade tennis. Players can do 4 kinds of hits with the 4 face buttons, such as lob or slice, with a coloured aura on each shot helping to visually notice which shot we’re reacting to. Use the wrong kit of reaction hit, and your character will be stunned for a second or so. Players can also hold the button for a more powerful shot, and use the aforementioned “super” skills, with power-ups in tennis boiling down to bombs that spawn on the terrain that can be a huge nuisance.
Lastly, there’s golf. With the power of shots decided by a little coordination minigame, players have to go towards the flag little by little, as sandtraps, portals, hurricanes and more rendering that a somewhat difficult task. Wind plays a part too, with players being able to putt with different kinds of golf clubs that all behave differently. Here, the power-ups can range from slowing down time, an extremely useful skill for preciely dosing the power of a shot, to even magnets and explosives that can add an extra boost and bounce to our ball once landed.
What are my options?
As said, there’s a tournament mode, which is the easiest way to experience all sports on a whim. The game randomly spins the wheel over 4, 6 or 8 rounds, giving the players a different sport from time to time to duel in. With bonus points assigned for various statistics and individual performances even in team sports, the winner will ultimately be the strongest athlete of the bunch, be it real life challengers or AI. Alternatively, players can hop onto any individual sport with custom rulesets, with more character customization to boot as well.
Indeed, not only players can change their team colours here, but a few visual changes too such as being left or right-handed, all the way down to the “tool” they use in their sports – such as the golf club or the tennis racket. Further customization can be unlocked by playing the single player Challenges, which also reveals new arenas for team sports, new sets of flags in new areas for golf, and so forth.
These Challenges help understanding some of the game mechanics better, with various changes to the game’s rules for players to tackle. Usually, winning a match isn’t the objective, but getting specific results is – dribbling opponents a certain amount of times, get the “super” meter to the max and successfully using it, and so forth. The challenges do eventually start repeating themselves in more difficult variations, but that’s not even the main flaw really.
The limit
Said Challenges are single player only, an odd choice for a game that is supposed to be played predominantly with friends. Unlocking new golf courses, new basketball fields or special balls is something that has to be done separately by a single person, an odd progression choice for such a game. Another disappointing, but not unusual limitation is the multiplayer and co-op itself, which can be done locally only – no online mode of any kind is present, something that could have extended the game’s depth and shelf life.
A lot of mechanics in Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports also suffer from a simple lack of precision. Tackles, shots and such not always react as you’d think, with faulty collisions allowing for straight-up running through opponents who are, in theory, tackling you. Golf is, perhaps, the least precise sport in the bunch, with the various wind, landing and such indicators often feeling like not having much relation to where the ball actually goes.
It’s especially baffling when the ball is near the flag, with a flag icon showing what power level we need to hit to reach the goal. Well, most of the time this indicator is completely busted, as it doesn’t take height changes and other factors into count. With slopes often even presenting odd invisible bumps, on a few holes it’s a bit of a mess to hit the final shots. I guess you can write it down to the relatively low budget of GameMill published titles, not to mention the wacky casual nature of the game, but a bit more precision and polish would have been nice.
That’s all, folks!
At the end of the day, I had a fun time with Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports. Sure it is a bit janky, its progression for unlocking new content is odd, and the lack of online multiplayer is a bit of a stinger. Yet, its simple arcade recreations of popular sports brings me back the simple days of mascot sports games of old, and it brought me a good couple hours of Looney Tunes-themed fun with my partner as well.
Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Faithful recreation of the Looney Tunes aesthetic
- Fun and accessible sports modes
- Can be quite a riot with friends
- Plenty of content for solo players too
CONS
- Not the most precise of games
- Odd choice to hide most unlocks behind single player challenges
- A few more sports wouldn't have hurt
- No online
