The difficulty and the relentless, tiresome jokes were too much. I stopped playing Battletoads with a sigh of relief. You should know pretty quickly how you feel about it - I did. Being on Xbox Game Pass, Battletoads is low stakes for subscribers. But Battletoads offers a much easier in - and subsequent out. To get two hours into The Simpsons arcade game, you needed to refinance your home to afford the lives. Battletoads tries to bring back the titular heroes in grand fashion, but over-complicates both the action and story, making me wonder if anything original Battletoads fans love is still intact. The original Battletoads was a hyper-difficult nightmare, beloved by some and hated by others. The Battletoads can turn into all sorts of weird stuff while they fight Image: DLALA, Rare/Xbox Game Studios ![]() It feels cheap, making it a little too difficult to take out one enemy without getting nearly killed by another. It’s less about managing an army of disposable henchpeople and more about waiting for the “tank” enemy to trip so you can deal damage. Numerous different enemy types force different approaches in a single fight, making it easy to get shot while you’re winding up to break a shield. But the new complexity ultimately breeds chaos, with too many enemy types to juggle and traps to avoid.Ĭombined with Battletoads’ extremely punishing difficulty in some sections - about three shots from a cannon enemy early in the game killed one of my toads - the combat becomes more frustrating than satisfying. The beat-’em-up genre has always been inherently simple, but Battletoads adds a host of mechanics, making the game’s combat more in-depth than its predecessors. And, by the end, I was still relieved to get off the bike and move on. My wife and I found more fun via our own failures on the goofy bike section than exploring new levels and progressing the story. I remember that laugh vividly, but I couldn’t tell you a single written joke. The combination of her frustration, and the very good sound/animation of a Battletoad hitting a wall had me laughing so hard I needed to pause to avoid crashing myself. During my few hours, a line or two got me, but the funniest part of the game had less to do with the game’s writing and more with Jamie’s inability to stay alive during the motorcycle level. Rash chatting in a spaceship Image: DLALA, Rare/Xbox Game Studiosįrom the second I started Battletoads, it was trying to get a laugh from me - throwing numerous jokes my way before I’d even have a chance to laugh at the first. Battletoads tries too hard for its own good It exhausted me, and despite all the effort, I never found Battletoads fun. The animations, enemies, and toads are all silly, absurdist, and weird, with each toad transforming into various animals, machines, or robots mid-combo.īut the game’s over-complicated mechanics and oppressive art style tried too hard to keep my attention. And thus, the Battletoads formula cemented itself.Īs we progressed through the rest of the game’s first act - which took about two hours - we played a few more beat-’em-up levels, another silly minigame, and a boss fight. The two of us rode at high speeds through a long tunnel, jumping over and dodging between obstacles. The third stage took us into a flying motorcycle level. Stage 2 wasn’t much of a stage at all, opting for a silly storytelling vignette of the Battletoads doing menial jobs to make ends meet - which just forces some simple button presses to finish the minigame. After we’d learned the basics, the first mission tossed us into a battle against a giant pink pig that we nearly mistook for TMNT’s Bebop. There’s the standard punch, an uppercut to finish near-death enemies or juggle them, a charge attack to break shields, a tongue lasso to pull enemies nearby or pull me to them, and the ability to slow enemies by spitting gum. ![]() Battletoads taught us a variety of different techniques.
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