The problem with Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports is it doesn’t feel fun to move. Characters like Road Runner should be a joy to nimbly navigate around a cartoon football field, but he’s as slow and unwieldy as Elmer Fudd – in fact, it doesn’t matter whether you’re Yosemite Sam or Sylvester the Cat, there’s a tardy and turgid nature to the gameplay that brings the whole package down.
That’s a shame because there’s a tantalising PS2 era energy to this title that we really appreciate. Across four different sports, it does its best Clap Hanz impression, serving up an over-the-top dose of basketball, football, tennis, and golf. Each of these are arcade in nature, with toggleable power-ups and fairly straightforward gameplay – although the controls can get a bit unwieldy in basketball and football specifically.
Tennis is perhaps the pick of the bunch, as you charge up your shots in a Virtua Tennis-style fashion and build up a power meter, enabling you to trigger a super shot. Some of these are actually really well executed, like where Wile E. Coyote launches himself out of a cannon and powers home a smash. The animations aren’t especially amazing, but they have personality and the cel-shaded artstyle is pretty nice, albeit not really pushing the PS5’s capabilities.
Still, the stodgy movement undermines the whole thing, and is more noticeable in basketball, where the entire game will pause while you wind up a dunk. Football feels similarly flat, as your player stops dead to charge up a shot at goal. It’s only really golf that doesn’t suffer from this underlying issue, although its ball physics are extremely basic, and so teeing up the perfect shot doesn’t carry the same sense of satisfaction as it does in, say, Everybody’s Golf.
It’s a nice idea, though, and we really like the various unlockable stadiums and equipment. There’s no online multiplayer, but local play is available for up to four friends – and there’s a rudimentary single player campaign which sees you completing up to 80 challenges across the four sports. Enough to hold your attention for a weekend, then.
Unfortunately, the slow, cumbersome movement undoes the otherwise likeable presentation. We’re glad this era of licensed games is slowly making a comeback, we just wished this was more fun to play.