Battletoads review

Before games like Dark Souls were the standard in being challenging and frustrating, we had Battletoads on the NES. Developed by Rare, the game was an extremely difficult brawler which mixed it up with levels that would test your patience including the infamous turbo-bike level.

While the series continued with a SNES sequel and a spin-off with Double Dragon, the series went silent, with talks about a new game for years. Finally, the Toads got brought back to the spotlight with a Battletoads remake on Xbox One.

This new Battletoads takes a new art direction which gives the game a Saturday morning cartoon look, self-referential humour and some improvements to the games, however despite its short playtime, it almost feels like it outstays its welcome as the game progresses.

The new Battletoads acts as a sequel to the original with Pimple, Zitz and Rash being rescued from a bunker that they’ve been stuffed into that was running a simulation to make them think that everyone loved them for 20 years.

Not able to cope with the new reality that the universe left them behind, the Toads go on another adventure to try to find a giant threat to the universe and punch it. This leaves them on an adventure that has them facing off against intergalactic lumberjacks, gymnasts, a cult, omnipotent beings and The Dark Queen.

The story is alright and does enough to make sense of everything that is happening, while the Toads’ humour – while sometimes dark and making fun of its audience a bit too harshly – can get enough chuckles that makes it an enjoyable romp.

But like the originals, it was the gameplay that kept you interested and Battletoads’ side-scrolling beat’em up gameplay is solid. Players are given a quick, launch and heavy attack buttons that can set up a small variety of combos which brings back their morph powers that made the original unique.

One of the newer features to get thrown into combat is the use of the Toads’ tongue, which can be used to fling them from the foreground to the background, pull enemies towards them, and shoot bubblegum to lock them in place.

Each Toad also comes with its own benefits. Pimple is slow but powerful, Zitz is fast and uses a lot of aerial attacks, while Rash is well balanced with a number of wide-area attacks. In single-player, you’re able to swap between all three Toads, meanwhile, multiplayer is available with up to 3 players, allowing players to pick and choose who they want.

Enemies change appearance in between acts, but there are only about 4 different types of enemies that you fight throughout the game, the cannon fodder which takes all sorts of damage, the blockers who need to have their guard dropped, snipers which shoot from a distance, and big enemies whose attacks have to be dodged before they can be hit.

While the fighting is generally fun, the game does switch it up by introducing a series of mini-games to break-up the segments and keep things fresh. The problem is that these are hit and miss.

While one hit was the return of the Turbo Bikes, which now places the camera behind the Toads so that we can see and plan our moves ahead of time (not that it really helped.) Other mini-games just left us scratching our heads asking why did we waste our time on this section, or lasted longer than it ever needed.

This may have been a problem with only playing two-player co-operative as a lot of the mini-games felt that they were designed with three players in mind, leaving one player to control two segments of the mini-game while the second player only having the one that was originally assigned to him by their character.

The mini-game problem is what made later levels uninteresting as the game started to depend on them more while cutting away from the formula that was making the game enjoyable.

The Battletoads came out during a time where it was cool to have giant mutant creatures fighting even space villains (see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Street Sharks, Biker Mice from Mars) so the Saturday Morning Cartoon vibe felt right to see to give the Toads more of a personality. It works well, even if it was jarring at when we first saw it.

While I think that the new Battletoads is alright, it hasn’t lived up to its predecessors or done enough to make it stand out on its own. It is much easier than the original and can be completed in about 4 hours – but it outstays its welcome by the halfway point and works its way to an ending that doesn’t feel like it deserves.

I do have some recommendations to make the game more fun though. The game is a three-player couch co-op game and I highly recommend following that idea that you should have two other friends play with you as it’ll make the mini-games bearable. Also, because it is a Microsoft Game Studios title, the game is available on the Microsoft Game Pass, where it would be the best place to pick it up and give it a try as 4 hours with not much replay value would make it a game that’s better suited for that platform.