Ever wanted to be a star and bask in the limelight of fame? Well no-one wants it more than four of our Looney Tunes favourites and it's up to you to make sure one of them hits the bigtime!

Loons: Fight for Fame is a clever and original concept that makes for a great multiplayer game. A couple of crooks plan to bankrupt a movie studio so they can buy it off for cheap, so they hire the worst director in town (Yosemite Sam) and four of the most unsuitable actors they can find, namely Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Taz. You take control of one of them and battle the others through a series of screen tests where being at centre stage is your main goal as you fight to become a star whilst keeping the others on the B-list.

Instead of an energy bar, each character has a star rating, which starts off half full. Your rating goes down as you take a beating from the others and goes up as you dish it out or take part in scene-stealing stunts and special effects. The presentation and graphics are superb, every aspect of the Looney Tunes world has been lovingly recreated and the three dimensional cartoon characters and sets are stunning. The animation on the characters is perfect, they look and move just like their TV counterparts, including the way they react to being beaten over the head with a club or landed on by a cow!

There are a number of stylised movie sets to work through that send-up film classics such as Indiana Jones, Clash of the Titans, Mission Impossible, James Bond, westerns and monster movies to name but a few. Each set is full of props and weapons to use against your opponents and includes plenty of film in-jokes. All of the weapons are great fun to use and cause suitably comical results. You can get hold of ray guns, bubble gum, bombs and rockets to fire at your opponents, shrink rays, thunder clouds that zap you with lightning and much more! Each level features a set of three or four different weapons, plus you all have your own close combat weapon to smack the others with, such as a frying pan or giant fish! When you injure another character they sway about with red stars circling their heads. One of the most fun weapons to use is one that drops objects on your opponents' heads - these include 1 ton weights, elephants, satellites and boulders and when you score a direct hit, your opponent is flattened and runs around like a pancake with feet! Your characters can also jump and speed around, when they hit turbo a cloud of dust is left in their wake. There are also pages of script that give you a random bonus that can be good or bad, including speed up or slow down, freeze yourself or freeze the others, booby traps, an extra star, invincibility and more.

On each set there are also a number of props that Yosemite Sam will fly in and activate from time to time, some of which are hidden in Acme crates. In the Western levels you can join a line of dancing can-can girls, swing through the air on a rope and play on a piano or organ grinder. In the Indiana Jones levels you get to swing great gaps to rescue a maiden in distress or steal a golden statue and you can dive into a pit of lava! In the Mission Impossible levels you can run your enemies over on a mini-motorbike, bomb them from the whirly-copter, plus there's a scene where you lower yourself down to a keyboard to deactivate an alarm! Each of the 15 themed levels have in-jokes and send-ups like this and the music, which is taken straight from the cartoons, changes when you're using a special prop to reflect the action, playing themes very similar to those of the movie that is being parodied. As well as this, the sound effects are authentic, with the sounds of falling objects, smashing frying pans and so on all being identical to their cartoon counterparts. The banter and comic remarks made by the characters throughout each level are quite amusing too, the voices provided by the people behind the cartoons.

Up to four people can join in the fun as the movie sets are fairly small and self-contained to allow the action to carry on without being crowded. In fact, the way the camera works is very clever as it zooms in and out to allow all four characters to stay in the shot, meaning that you can get up close if you're scrapping together or see the whole set when you're spread out. A character loses when their star rating drops to zero and they are removed from the set until a winner remains. Meanwhile, if your star rating reaches maximum, a special star zone opens up allowing you to enter one of 7 mini-games that, once unlocked, can be accessed from the separate arcade mode. These are recreations of the classic retro games of old. Snake (you know, the game from your mobile phone) is reproduced in a massive bullfighting arena viewed from above. All four toons charge in, each with a different coloured trail of dust that gradually increases the longer you stay in the arena. You charge about attempting to cause the others to hit the wall or one of the trails until the winner emerges. There are variations on Pac-Man, Spy Hunter, Space Invaders and others. These mini-games are simple, fun to play and a good extra addition to the main game.

There are a couple of things that could have been improved - some of the areas on the set are quite hard to reach by jumping because of the angle they are viewed from and perhaps younger players might struggle to get there. Also, when you're playing against only one other character it's quite hard to get your star rating up to unlock the mini-game. You can't really attack the other character too much or he'll die before you get your star rating full, so you just have to run around avoiding him and getting all the special props. It would have been nice to include other Looney Tunes characters too, even if they were just cameo appearances. Obviously this game is not going to last forever, but I don't think all games should have to, if a game is short-lived by nature it doesn't matter as long as it's masses of fun (Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin on Gamecube come to mind here). However, there is enough variety in the sets and enough different challenges that will keep you going for a while and the four-player mode is a great laugh to play with your mates.

Loons: Fight for Fame is a brilliantly designed interactive cartoon with totally authentic graphics, sound, music, props and wonderful animation. The idea is original and although fun in single-player, it shines most when your friends join the chaos. The inclusion of many challenges and 7 mini-games adds to the longevity as much as possible. Every fan of the Looney Tunes cartoon will love it.

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).