The Evil Scientist, the bad guy in the story, is more than sick of the Looney Tunes and would very much like to end their whacky spree of one-liners and practical jokes. His plan goes like this: make a time machine and travel back to the days in the past. Once there, eradicate the ancestors of our favorite cartoon characters which would lead to the non-existence of the Looney Tunes we got to know today. In some mysterious way, Bugs Bunny and Marvin Martian managed to pick up sent of this evil plan and decided to steal the blueprints of the Evil Scientist’s machine and build a time-travelling unit of their own to stop the bad guy from completing his evil scheme!

What I expect from the average Looney Tunes game is a somewhat decent platform/action game where you have to solve puzzles which aren’t all that hard and you start laughing every five minutes because a marvelous one-liner by your favorite cartoon character. These characteristics are partially true when talking about ACME Arsenal. It does involve an action game with easy puzzles. Looney Tunes are supposed to be funny, which would declare the adjective “Looney” (which synonym would be crazy), but Red Tribe seems to have missed the point completely. Even the smallest infant wouldn’t be able to show a tiny smile because of the extreme dullness of this game.

Apart from missing the typical jokes, the developers did manage to show the tunes in a somewhat decent way. You actually have the feeling of walking in a cartoon (characters and environment), even though the graphical quality isn’t the top of the bill. Sadly this positive aspect is immediately nullified in a very skillful manner. As I said, the environments look quite good, but hey miss “life”. Every now and then there does happen something like a spaceship crashing through the floor, but these are rather unique events. Logically this results in dull, monotonous levels where, apart from some robotic thingies which you can smash to bits and pieces, there’s nothing to see or do at all. Trust me, you’ll never stop and watch the world around you since there’s, well, … Nothing to see…

The monotony found in the environment persists in about every other aspect of ACME Arsenal. Controls which allow button-bashing and the continuous execution of the same combo over and over again really do sufise to complete the game. Boring music which is mainly caused by repeating the same track over and over again during an entire level. Dull one-liners (they’re not even close to funny) which are shouted by the Tunes while decapitating the enemy with a guitar or something like it. Before I forget, the monotonous environment isn’t only as dead as Mr. Sodamn Insane, the level design also becomes very familiar after playing one or two of them because frankly, there’s nearly no difference. You’ll find yourself jumping from one platform to another while banging some serious metallic heads along the way. Once in a while you’ll have to find a switch to open a door, but that’s about all the variation you’ll get.

To make everything even worse, the entire ACME Arsenal concept sucks King Kong’s über monkey balls. The title does somewhat reveal the possible content of the game which is Looney Tunes combined with crazy weapons. Oké, fair enough, if those bloody weapons would be of some use… The first problem is found in the entire aiming system. You can only shoot your weapon when you’ve locked you crosshair on to an enemy and that’s the major issue here. There’s no possibility to select any targets, the game does this for you. On average it goes for any potential victim nearest to the center of your screen. This can be an adversary, but it might just as well be a box surrounded by evil bots ready to eat your cartooned meat. Add a bad camera to that and you have the perfect recipe for flying controllers. A second problem is the scarcity of weapons and ammo. In my opinion there’s not even the smallest sign of an arsenal, perhaps a better name would be “ACME small hobbyist collection”. The arms can be found on enemies, but that doesn’t happen very often, and can be bought in vending machines placed in various levels. However, these vending machines tend to rip you off! You’ll pay a sh*tload of coins for one gun with the minimum amount of ammunition.

To make us forget the immense boredom, the game comes equipped with two multiplayer possibilities. First up, there’s the co-op mode. You’ll get the chance to play through the entire storyline together with a friend or possible unknown person because, yes indeed, this mode supports both Xbox Live and playing on one console! On the other hand, there’s no real reason to call this cooperation because it’s more like a tag battle than fighting together. The second option you have is a kind of free-for-all deathmatch. Where you get to battle it out to determine who’s the greatest and most violent cartoon hero of all times… Yeah! What still bothers me, is that this last mode can only be played in split-screen! From both game types, you’d think the latter would be a better choice to take to the Xbox Live platform rather than the co-op? Anyhow, no serious multiplayer action in deathmatch…