Toonstruck

User Rating: 7 | Toonstruck PC

Toonstruck is a point and click adventure. The game features hand-drawn imagery and animated characters which looks like a classic cartoon. Main protagonist Drew Blanc is live action, played by Christopher Lloyd of Back To The Future fame.

You left-click to move, left-click to interact, and right-click to examine. Spacebar skips dialog. Esc skips cut-scenes, F1 brings up options menu, F5 for Save menu, F6 to Load. If you click to move screens, you can skip the walking animation by right-clicking.

Drew Blanc is a cartoonist of a cute rabbit; Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun. His boss demands he creates more rabbit characters to cash in on the success. With a tight schedule, Drew is lacking inspiration; he has drew a blank. A lightning storm turns on his TV which is showing his cartoon. He gets sucked into his TV set and ends up in a cartoon land. He meets one of his characters, Flux Wildly, who then accompanies him on his journey. He meets the king who tells him that Count Nefarious has a device that turns residents evil. The King aims to make the opposite device. The Kings inventor gives you a blueprint of Nefarious' device, and you must use your imagination to what the opposite components are. The components are based on phrases rather than actually opposites. You are given the example that the opposite of "Spice" is "Sugar".

The land consists of: Cutopia where the happy characters live, Malevolands is where the more evil characters reside, and Zanydu seems more of a grey area and this is Flux Wildly's home town.

Point-and-click adventures are usually full of humour, and the cartoon nature means there's plenty of opportunites for slapstick humour and cartoon clichés. If you enjoyed classic Looney Tunes and shows like Animaniacs, then you will be right at home with this.

The puzzles are fairly logical if you are experienced with point-and-click adventures. The overall aim wasn't very clear since I mainly only knew what the blueprint required after I had the item. It takes a while to get going since at the start, you are pretty much just walking around and talking to all the characters you see. After you complete the device, you move onto the second act of the game. I found this section to be a bit harder and was easier to miss items.

Toonstruck is a decent point-and-click adventure, and I really appreciated the cartoon meets live action style.