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| Category | Adventure |
| Players | 1 |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Review Date | 11/96 |
| Developer | Burst |
| Publisher | Virgin |
| Minimum System Requirements |
| 486 DX2/66, DOS 5.0+ |
| 8MB RAM |
| 30MB Hard Drive Space |
| SVGA 640x400 256 colors |
| 2x CD-ROM & SoundCard |
What do you get when you mix Sam & Max, Roger Rabbit, and
Ren & Stimpy together into a computer game? When Virgin/Burst turned
on their cartoon blender, they came up with Toonstruck, a talking animated
adventure game. Of course such a mix wouldn't be complete without some star
power and Toonstruck, therefore, has plenty. In contrast to his villainous
role in Roger Rabbit, 
Christopher Lloyd this time stars as good guy Drew Blanc, a burned out animator
who falls into the wacky animated world of his own creation. In the game, you
guide the live action sprite of the Drew/Lloyd character through three cartoon
lands trying to unravel various puzzles in order to get back home. Your sidekick
in this adventure is Flux Wildly, the ever sarcastic purple toon voiced by Dan
Castellaneta (TV's Homer Simpson). Tim Curry, in yet another PC game role, provides
the voice of your main nemesis and evil-doer par excellence -- Count Nefarious.
Yes, those are the three toon lands you will travel through, with scenary ranging
in style from cotton-candy cute to wacky psychedelic to dark and forboding.
The graphics have an attractive cartoon look with crisp colors, loads of embedded
animations and a good dose of cut scene animations. The characters have appropriately
exagerated expressions and surprising antics. So graphics-wise, this game is
a real joy to watch (even after the novelty of a live video sprite wears off).
The music and sound effects are also top notch. And there's quite a wide range
of voice characterizations, including a sexy valley girl clerk, an evil Christopher
Walken-style positronic robot, and a fast-talking Ross Perot-like salesman.
I was somewhat disappointed, however, that the sidekick's voice was so high
and altogether different from the Homer Simpson-esque bumbling I was expecting.
And it's too bad the actors couldn't have toned down some of the stereotypically
shrill toons whose voices get a little annoying. But after all, you kind of
expect a bit of that in this type of game, so I'll let that go. I'm still wondering,
though, why the Drew/Lloyd character pronounces nefarious with the syllable
far as in the word far, while most of the other characters pronounce
it as in the word fair. Oh well, never mind.
Of
course good graphics and sound aren't enough to carry an adventure game. You
need a good story and/or a fair share of humor. Toonstruck obviously
skimps on story and plot, settling instead on a heavy handed Wizard of Oz theme
and a run of the mill cartoon battle of good versus evil. There is a twist thrown
in, but the story is not all that satisfying. Fortunately Toonstruck
makes up for the story in the humor department. In a cartoon game it's very
easy to just throw in silly gags and stupid voices, but in Toonstruck
many of the jokes are actually quite funny, both verbally and visually. There
are also some pretty good puns and quite a few well-placed sexual double-entendres.
Not all the jokes hit their mark, but enough do that you won't be disappointed.
Toonstruck plays like most modern graphical adventures games: Point and click, and click some more. The adequately sized cursor changes appropriately when you mouse over a talking character, an interactive object, or a navigable path. So it's easy to spot interactions on the screen and to navigate from screen to screen. There's a nice option for quick-travel whereby you right-click on a navigation point to go there immediately rather than waiting for your character to walk across an entire scene. This saves quite a bit of time when you have to backtrack through several scenes. And further into the game you can use the famous cartoon black hole to jump between several distant areas. All those interface elements are more than adequate.
The inventory system, however, is awkward. You have a bottomless bag which holds all your stuff, but you can only see your items when you click on the bag, and when you do that, the contents of the bag take up the whole screen. So to try out an inventory item on something in a scene, you have to click on the bag, click on the item, click the bag away, and then click on the scene. The two wasted mouse clicks quickly become annoying, especially if you get stuck and need to try out several inventory items. A scrolling inventory at the bottom of the screen would have been a lot more handy. Another minor interface annoyance is the mechanism for interrupting or speeding up character dialog. At many points you may want to speed up the dialog by reading it off the screen and interrupting the spoken voices. A natural extension of the quick-travel idea would be to use the right mouse button to skip to the next line of dialog. But instead the games uses the space bar for that; if you forget and instead right click during a dialog, you will end the dialog completely.
While
I'm talking about implementation oddities, I also want to mention that Toonstruck
is a DOS game. It will run in a Win95 DOS box, but unlike other recent DOS games,
Toonstruck doesn't allow Win95 to multitask properly. So first of all
I'm surprised and annoyed that there isn't a native Win95 version of Toonstruck
even though it's been about a year since the introduction of DirectX, and I'm
even more annoyed that the DOS implementation behaves so rudely. What's up with
that? Surely one of the other Virgin affiliated developers could have helped
port Toonstruck, or at least made it a better behaved program.
Well, enough ranting about implementation. What about the puzzles? Besides the good graphics and sound, Toonstruck packs a healthy collection of challenging puzzles, many of them well-integrated into the story. None of them are all that novel, but what they lack in novelty they mostly make up for in cuteness or humor. There are a few easy dexterity games and a handful of relatively simple logic puzzles (yes, one of them's a slider), but the majority of puzzles are inventory based. In fact the biggest puzzle of all is your primary quest to gather a large set of objects to power a certain contraption. A few of these inventory puzzles turn out to be somewhat obtuse (I found myself having to flail through the inventory and backtrack more than I think should be necessary), but on the whole there's a good balance of complexity: Many of the puzzles are hard enough to be satisfying, but straight forward enough to be solvable.
Toonstruck is not without flaws, but it's still a very good game -- good enough to dethrone Sam & Max from the top spot on my list of wacky cartoon adventures 8-).
Revolution Report Card |
B+ |
| - Wonderful cartoon animation. - Engaging voices and above average humor. - Good game length and puzzle complexity. - Minor flaws and annoyances. - Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun. |