Little kids wouldn't even like this game...Trust me, they told me so.
One would think that playing as the various characters most of us grew up with on television would be fun, an enjoyable romp through classic TV pop culture – but that “one” would be wrong. Very wrong. In Plucky’s Big Adventure, you are forced to sit through one of the most mundane storylines in gaming history and are then placed in control of Plucky, Babs, Buster, and Hampton, the four most popular characters from the Tiny Toons television series.
With Plucky obviously serving as the main character, you are challenged with finding gears and tools to help Plucky convert his bicycle into a makeshift time machine, so that he may travel back in time and do his homework that is now minutes from being due.
This is where the little inkling of fun that you might have been having flies out the proverbial window. The gameplay is so simplistic that in all truthfulness it’s possible to complete the game with one hand tied behind your back. You enter the outside courtyard, tennis court and eventually the school proper while searching for basic items like food and keys, which can be used in other rooms of the school to obtain key items for the bike. After you take the five minutes needed to find Plucky’s main item, you are then sent in as Hampton, and eventually as Babs and finally Buster.
In an effort to mix things up a bit, the game throws in Max and Elmyra, two characters that are out to capture our heroes. Elmyra is easy enough to avoid, but Max is a little trickier. I didn't say he was hard to avoid, but you do actually have to pay attention to his movements, whereas with Elmyra, well, you don't. If, by chance, you do happen to get captured by either of the villains, you are thrown into a holding cell and must backtrack to this location as one of the previous characters to rescue him/her. However, if Plucky happens to be the one to get captured, it’s game over, as obviously he was the first character you controlled.
The sound has a cartoon feel to it, as can be expected, but it does nothing to spice up the bland gameplay. The only sound effects worth mentioning are the simple closing of doors or the sound of the bell in the bell tower. Definitely nothing extraordinary here. The graphics are abysmal with clipping running rampant throughout the halls, and unfortunately, the negatives keep on comin’.
Like most games of this type, there can be four of five different items separating you from your main objective (i.e.: Take Item A to Room 1 and convert it into Item B. Take Item B to Room 2 and use it in lockbox to receive Item C, and so on). This being the case, a large inventory would be expected, but again, the one expecting such things would be wrong. Instead, you can only carry two items at a time, and I can say with a large chunk of confidence that this fact is the most irritating aspect of the title as a whole.
So, instead of being able to carry a larger number of items at once, you are forced to backtrack to the hall of lockers to store and / or retrieve them. Each character has their own locker, which is of course locked, so you must waste even more time tracking down their combinations before you can accomplish even the most simple of tasks.
You can play through the entire game in well under 45 minutes, and even that is too long to be forced into playing a game this bad. And what's worse – Where we could have been rewarded with a fantastic scene of Plucky traveling through time and space to confront the error of his ways, we instead are shown Plucky’s bicycle smashing into a brick wall, in true cartoon style. The moral of the story? “Always do your homework, kids, or you’ll end up just like Plucky” – filled to the brim with wild ideas that will never work and still without a completed sheet of homework. Seriously? That’s the ending? You mean to tell me I wasted 45 minutes of my life so that a cartoon rabbit could tell me it’s better to do my homework than to put it off? My seven-year-old niece could have told me that…but alas, such is the life of a bargain shopper – sometimes you really get what you pay for, and in this case, a couple of bucks really was too much.