Spawned from a genre that was known for munching coins at the arcade, Nintendo Entertainment System’s Battletoads was notoriously difficult in an era of difficult games. That original title served as a time-capsule of sorts. Mouthy anthropomorphic heroes ushering in the ‘tude era of media in a game that would be less than an hour long if it wasn’t so merciless and so cheap.
Though the series ended after only two further major entries, the 1991 side-scrolling beat-em-up is fondly remembered by many. Battletoads (2020) resurrects the long dormant trio but unfortunately did so via the hidden cemetery from Pet Sematary.
Mildly Amusing Premise
The game starts with players being thrust into a long tutorial level. Despite the original series living in a mostly voiceless era, the game’s characters speak with irritating regularity. And with so many moves to learn with their accompanying explanation, the opening stage has none of the flow you expect from a beat-em-up.
Those who can drag themselves through the first level will find the game’s first mildly redeeming feature – an early plot twist that humorously explains the trio’s delusion of continued relevance. This is followed by the few mini-games that were actually entertaining. Working menial jobs in video games isn’t exactly fresh but these brief shifts are funny.
After that it all continues downhill with only some brief bright points.
Plays Wrong
Our Gaming Editor called a similar resurrection, Streets of Rage 4, ‘Delicious Bin Turkey‘ in the headline for his review. Christian Wait praised the dedication to a simple set of mechanics that the devs exploited to its fullest. For him, SoR4 didn’t “take the series in a new direction nor did it need to”.
The early beatings of Battletoads have flashes of the genre’s brilliance broken up by mini-games and control clutter. There are just too many commands to juggle. Something that is especially obvious when some commands aren’t necessary for extended periods of time; a player can literally forget allegedly integral commands due to their scant use.
Battletoads drags its controls away from the simple and intuitive control of beat-em-ups. So much so, that there are three-input combinations for collecting health and swapping layers amongst others.
Later in the game these awkward tongue mechanics will frustrate many. Trying to flick a tongue at tiny boss bits is a particularly annoying task when trying to avoid the hordes of enemies.
Eventually it becomes impossible to corral these masses and subsequently the game just wastes those complex controls. Players will just end up spamming quick attacks and then jumping away for 90+% of the beat-em-up sections.
After an hour and a bit, the game decides to change direction completely. The game abandons itself to uninspired platforming and twin-stick shooting that most of you won’t have gotten used to by the time it ends. Battletoads seems to have no faith in its foundations.
Looks Mostly Wrong
Battletoads (2020) is a bland visual experience that seems to aim at being generic. It looks like every cutesie sci-fi game made in the last 15 years. The enemies lack enough variety for how many they throw at you in each scene. And even though their designs can be creative, that bland style drains all life from them.
It must be said that the artists did an amazing job filling the screens with detail. There is also a nice sense of faux-depth in the 2D sections.
However, Battletoads (2020) doesn’t emulate the pixelated cartoon background style of the original series well. The mostly understated, muted hues and the lack of pencil lines in the BG art do not really suit the characters in front of it.
The toads themselves are the bright spot in all of this. While a few things have changed a bit, they are unmistakably Battletoads. The pencilling, the oversized detail and the updated-but-still-familiar use of colour tie the 2020 sprites to their past.
The animations are obviously better refined than the series’ heyday but aren’t overly so, preserving some of the charm of the older games. For, example our toads are mostly unanimated when jumping or hitting some longer special attacks, mirroring the techniques of yore.
Sounds a Bit Wrong
The first few minutes of Battletoads (2020) serve as an omen for what’s to come. Self-aware to a point of self-hatred, the dialogue and humour is depressing. As if the game is insecure about whether the early 90s or the series itself is even worth revisiting.
For a series from a time before cut-scenes and dialogue, Battletoads loves to talk. The endless jokes and dozens of cut-scenes break up the pace of the game. The sub-par writing and choice of tone are only magnified by the endless onslaught of verbiage.
Crawling Through the Mire
When the spam heats up, players fight for far too long on the same screen. Often a player will spend 3-5 minutes clearing a screen, only to have more squads pile in over and over again. This causes the pace to become glacial when it’s not stopping for minigames, to teach you new controls or for cut-scenes.
The original games were known for their punishing, often cruel difficulty. Battletoads captures some of the series’ difficulty but, to its credit, is a lot fairer. The game is still exhausting but does deliver some accomplishment. It undermines this a little by offering unlimited lives for a given area when a player fails a certain number of times. Even if this only tempts a small subset of people, it denies them that full sense of accomplishment.
Incoherent
26 years is a long time in any medium but resurrecting a game so antithetical to today’s thirty-hour cakewalks was always going to come with many pitfalls. Battletoads (2020) falls into a few of these while adding many new issues, obscuring what redeeming qualities its lineage had.
A deluge of self-awareness and flow-breaking minigames, cutscenes and chit-chat dilutes what little of Battletoads is worthy of the name. But the game’s biggest sins are its lack of coherency that feeds a lack of identity. Art that doesn’t fit – either together on screen or as part of the series. Controls that don’t fit the genre or the game. Parts of the game that don’t fit the game.
Even when available for free as part of Xbox Game Pass, Battletoads is only worth a try for beat-em-up die-hards. Those of you tempted out of nostalgia probably won’t recognise the games you played as a child while the awful pace and grinding humour will put off newcomers.
Reviewed on PC, review copy provided by PR
