Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem review - "A charming casual ARPG"

Looking back at classic Looney Tunes cartoons is quite the eye-opener. What these zanily-drawn characters did to each other was horrific.

You had safes being dropped on heads, explosions turning bodies to ash, and anvils creating human pancakes. Any modern day live action remake would need to carry an X-rating.

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It makes more sense than you might expect, then, to find a game that sets gangs of these beloved cartoon characters against one another in mortal combat.

Toon army

That's the premise of Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem, a casual action RPG for the smartphone age.

It's a familiar formula by now. Steadily assemble a crew of diverse class-based characters, pick a team, then send them into countless turn-based scraps.

Once in battle, you must patiently take turns to select from a limited yet bespoke roster of moves. Bugs Bunny can drop a safe on his opponent's head, while deep cut Fishercat Sylvester Jr can heal the team with a tasty fish supper.

Meep meep

As those character and move selections suggest, the biggest draw with Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem is the Looney Tunes IP itself.

This sort of game lives and dies by how much interest you have in the stuff you're grinding for. If the core characters are bland or indistinct, it's very easy to give up in the face of the sheer simplicity of the gameplay.

But when you're working towards unlocking Road Runner or Marvin The Martian, it's rather different. It helps that the developer has nailed the visual execution, with outlandish and beautifully animated special moves that really capture the essence of the characters.

What's up, doc?

As someone who really isn't a fan of action RPG, I found Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem genuinely compelling for this very reason. Or at least, I did to start with.

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The inevitable effects of repetition and shallowness and especially the myriad collectible doodahs soon took its toll, and the game's bright appeal started to fade. It's the kind of game that spends most of its lengthy tutorial talking about its convoluted freemium systems rather than its core gameplay, which can be (and indeed is) adequately summarised in seconds.

Still, if you're a fan of both casual ARPGs and the classic Looney Tunes universe, there's a lot of simple fun to be had with World of Mayhem. That's all folks.