Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider

The Good
This game has a very interesting premise, you are Ralph Wolf (cousin of the more famous Wily E. Coyote) and you are a contestant on Daffy Duck's game show "Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf"! There are 15 levels, and you are required to steel one of the sheep that Sam Sheepdog is guarding. You get to use the superfast mailboxes, along with plenty of funny ACME gadgets for the game, and you get to play with the wonderfully funny cartoon logic. The audio is very good, too, you get to actually hear all the characters talking. And as far as I can remember, they sound just as good as they do on TV. Plenty of things that you do in this game would make no sense in the real world, but that's part of what makes this game so great - you really do feel like you're in the Looney Tunes world!

The Bad
Daffy looked a little weird in his suit, otherwise nothing.

The Bottom Line
If you like Looney Tunes at all you should get this game! If you don't like Looney Tunes, but you do like comedy you should get this game! And if you just like computer puzzle games, you should get this game! Basically everyone should at least try this game because it's so much fun, and it really does transport you to another world!

The Good
The graphics look great considering it's a PS1 game. The characters are well animated and and the controls are good. The levels are colorful and have lots of detail, and overall the look and feel of the original cartoons are convincingly recreated in 3D. Each level is large and unique and provides a good challenge. I especially like the time travel level 8 and there's even an hidden extra level involving time travel.

The music is good and the voices of all the characters (Daffy, Porky, Elmer etc.) sound very close to the original cartoons. It even contains complete spoken dialogues for 6 different languages all on one single disc. All in all the production value really shows.

The Bad
In many places there's little room for error. It's easy to miss a jump, accidentally step into Sam's field of vision, or place a rock incorrectly.

Often there are many steps required to set up an elaborate solution, and every time you fail you have to repeat the steps over and over until you get it just right. On top of that there are unskippable death animations (Sam punching you, piranha eating you etc) and occasional problems with the camera, which make the game frustrating to play.

Occasionally the room for error is so small, that you think you are taking a wrong approach. For example on level 4 you simply don't get enough time to pick up a sheep after you knock out Sam, and the boss fight in level 10 is just impossible even when you know what to do. There also are some dead ends and glitches. For example at the end of level 11 you can get stuck if run out of lettuce. And in level 14, when you catapult the sheep onto the train it gets stuck in mid air(!). Also waiting on the train to arrive, sometimes for more than a minute, can be very tedious.

This is a real shame because I suspect the flaws lie mostly in the level design and configuration. With a little more testing and tweaking it could have been so much better.

The Bottom Line
A great puzzle game with lots of originality and high production values, but in some places tedious which I assume could have been fixed with more gameplay testing.