Game Review: Looney Tunes Dash (Mobile – Free to Play)

Looney Tunes Dash is every endless runner game ever…but with a Looney Tunes twist.

That should be the review over already…I mean what more do you need to know? It’s filled with in-app purchases & offers about 1 hours worth of fun. There is more variety then you often get in these kinds of games thanks to the world in which it is set but the gameplay offers nothing new.

So lets talk about what you actually get here…the game is split into areas that cover one characters Looney Tunes world, the first area being Bugs Bunny being chased by Elmer Fudd in a forest. Dodge obstacles & other Looney Tunes characters, complete a task (picking stuff up, destroying stuff) & reach the goal while picking up as many coins as possible.

Later playable characters & areas include Roadrunner & Tweety Bird all with relevant obstacles & tasks.

The game is controlled by swiping at the screen of your device with a finger. Swipe left to move left, swipe down to slide, swipe up to jump etc. It’s the same controls for every endless runner & they work perfectly fine here.

As well as having good controls Looney Tunes Dash also happens to be one of the prettier endless runners on the market. Everything looks so sharp & the colourful worlds really speak volumes.

Like all free to play games Looney Tunes Dash has its fair share of in-app purchases. This should not come as a surprise to anyone…

The main currency is coins (you pick them up in levels) and they are used to upgrade your power-ups & abilities (more of which become available as you reach further levels). £0.79 will get you £8,000 coins which could buy you the first level of 2 power-ups & leave a little change over. There is little call to upgrade these early on but in later levels you’ll become much more reliant on them to get through some tricky areas.

The premium currency is Looney Bucks & £0.79 will get you 10 bucks. This is where I get angry…

Bucks are used for one thing, actually playing the damn game! Let me explain….should you fail a level you will be given the option to carry on exactly where you left off with everything you had collected to that point all for 9 Bucks. What a random number…and then you realise the 10 Bucks you paid 79p for only covers 1 retry. Yep, a mid-level retry would cost you 79p each time. Do you see the problem?

….but that is not all. You see you only have a limited number of lives to replay a level consecutively & once you are out you either have to wait out a timer or pay 10 Bucks for more. Your premium currency will be gone so quick thanks to the high difficulty as well.

The games obstacles are actually pretty easy to dodge & while later levels do get tougher, skilled players with quick reactions will have no problem expect for one thing…the level objective. Fail that & you have to restart it again & some of these are really tough. Say you have to collect 30 things throughout the level & you miss a massive cluster because you missed a switch a bit further back that would have activated a jump pad allowing you to get to the cluster. Not getting them might be the difference between failing & finishing the level.

It’s incredibly frustrating as not all switches are useful & often there is little way to know until you’ve hit it & seen what it activates.

The game tries to keep your interest by rewarding you with cards (read stills) from famous episodes of the corresponding cartoon. It’s nice to have a reward but most of the game isn’t worth sinking the time into.

One of the better looking & fairer free to play endless runners out there but still heavily flawed. As long as they all continue to adopt this greedy model for in-app purchases they will always be flawed. You could get a couple of hours of gameplay out of this before it gets far too tough without spending real money.

Keep this in mind – to retry a level from the point you failed at 10 times would end up costing you £7.90. That there is the problem…