Toonstruck

The Good
Remember "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" The movie had this sequence in which Bob Hoskins instead of dealing with cartoon characters in the real world actually travelled to the "Toon World" and had to make sense of the weird rules and stuff in there. Well, Toonstruck is the adventure-game version of exactly that. Playing as the down-on-his-luck illustrator Drew Blanc (perfectly casted as the eternal crazy scientist Christopher Lloyd) you get zapped Tron-style into the cartoon kingdom of "Cutopia" which is in dire need of a champion. Some evil force has created a machine that is twisting the nice landscapes and inhabitants of Cutopia into dark versions of themselves, and you have to put a stop to that by finding the pieces for a machine that will have the opposite effect with the help of a mostly annoying cartoon sidekick named Flux.

Divided into two separate parts, the game takes you through several varied locations filled with sight gags and obscure references, and while it initially seems that the game is far too cutie-cutie, the game manages to balance the sugar coated Cutopia with such locations as the chaotic Zanydu and the dark and twisted transformations that take place every now and then thanks to the bad guy's machine (including the famous cow that gets turned into an S&M maniac!) thus putting some adult stuff into the mix. As for the game itself, it plays as your average point 'n click adventure game in which you control a context-sensitive pointer that allows Drew to pick up, open, operate and use stuff in the gameworld. Nothing new here but considering it works as good as ever, there's no reason to bitch about.

If there is an area where the game excells at however, is in the production values. The graphics are very well made, combining really good hand-drawn backgrounds and characters with the digitized Lloyd for a particularly well made effect. This "digitized character over artificial backgrounds" stuff isn't something that always comes off nice, but Toonstruck manages to avoid most of the pitfalls of the technique (such as the overly stiff characters) and the end result is pretty good. As for the character animation the game doubles as a particularly impressive showcase of cel-animation, as you can appreciate in the spectacular cutscenes sprinkled all over the game as well as in the main game, they truly capture the style of the classic Tex Avery-inspired over-exagerated toons and are a sight to behold for anyone that loves this kind of animation (and who doesn't?). Soundwise, the game is no slouch either, with a full cast of animation veterans behind the voice acting and the most complete collection of classic "toon music" (think "Dance of the Swords", etc.) ever assembled for a game that will instantly take the player back to the days when he watched the good old WB cartoons in front of the TV.

The Bad
The comedy writing is pretty much oriented towards the "watch nasty stuff happen to small furry animals" kinda comedy, which has it's charms but gets pretty old fast. This coupled with a collection of illogical and wacky puzzles that often frustrate the player leaves you with a game that ends up being substantially less fun than it could have been.

The story itself is functional enough, but it starts to loose it's direction by the second half of the game in which you lose your cartoon sidekick and which basically ditches the plot if favor of a "get out of the haunted castle" scenario. The ending is left wide open either because they ran out of money to complete the game or because they were hoping for a sequel that never got made. And finally, there are some clocking issues with today's machines which require you to use a slowdown utility if you want to play the game in anything past Pentiums 2-3 class processors.

The Bottom Line
Too ambitious? Who knows... Toonstruck is an above-average adventure game whose flaws are born mostly from lack of direction. With a tighter story and a less ambitious scope (the game sets out to be end-all, be-all cartoon adventure) this game could have been a classic of the genre. But as it stands today it's merely a cult hit due mostly to the fantastic animation it has. If only for that, collectors and adventure fans should seek it out, everyone else on the other hand can pass it.