Battletoads Review

Full disclosure: I have never played the original Battletoads.

Up until this month, my previous knowledge of the original game consisted of its status as a never ending prank call subject that tortures GameStop employees to this day. There’s also some notoriously difficult hoverbike level that nobody on the planet ever seemed to beat.

Funny enough, I was still at GameStop when Battletoads came back to modern consoles as a part of the Rare Replay compilation. Just a few years later, we now have a proper reboot.

The game starts out simply enough, as you take control of Rash, Zitz, and Pimple to pummel your way through waves of enemies in celebration of your status as heroes of the galaxy.

What immediately stuck out to me was just how beautifully animated it is. I’d compare it more to a full-on animated cartoon rather than just a well-animated video game. The color palates are vibrant and pop off the screen even when the action is at its heaviest. It isn’t just limited to the character sprites either; the detail put into backgrounds shows a level of dedication to nailing an actual TV show aesthetic. To put it in perspective: the pinnacle of animated games for me is Rayman Legends and this is about as close as I’ve seen anything get that level of fidelity.

Matching that art is an overall tone that’s as cheeky as early 90s era animation classics like Ren and Stimpy without an over-reliance on gross-out humor and not-so-subtle innuendo. It still has its moments, including an entire on-rail level that has you riding on a corpse. It sounds darker than it actually is.

It’s like Weekend at Bernie’s but with 100% more corpse sledding

Even more impressive were little nuances I found when it came to the fighting system. Seemingly every single attack can be cancelled out of on hit, giving you a lot of flexibility when it comes to chaining from one enemy to the next. You can cancel a light attack into a launcher, a morph attack into a jump, or even cancel mid-combo into an invincible dash. This lets you keep a combo going as well as escape out of unfavorable skirmishes you might find yourself in. You can even cancel attacks into tag-outs for your other toads. Tagging out lets you get a character on the verge of death out while continuing your combo because the tag out itself counts as an attack. Once that concept fully stuck, it opened up what looked like pretty stock fighting system into something much deeper.

Being a Battletoads game means its full of minigames to break up the action as well. From menial office work to Olympic posing to straight up Geometry Wars, it serves the game well that these are sprinkled throughout, as the levels in the first half of the game come very close to wearing out their welcome. Combat can only carry you so far if a level just never ends.

Yes, the turbobike level is back

As surprising as how good the overall package is, there’s still a few things that detract from the experience. Besides the previously mentioned level length, the voice acting at times doesn’t quite deliver with the humor the game aims for. On the audio side of things, there’s this weird tendency for music to fade out completely when you aren’t actively in a fight. It’s incredibly jarring to go from high-energy metal playing during a long combat section to dead silence. If there was ambient music for the rest periods in between, those cool down periods wouldn’t be nearly as pronounced. It becomes less noticeable as the game goes on because once again, they seem to have found their pacing properly in the second half.

Should you buy it, wait for a sale, or skip it?

I would actually go ahead and buy it. It certainly starts out a little slow and rough in some spots but as the game progresses, you quickly realize that it successfully modernizes a genre that has struggled to grow significantly over the last couple of generations. The combat is as fluid and smooth as the art is. When you combine those things with a wide variety of minigames to break up the action and wrap that all up in a ridiculous package, you’ve got a game that makes me say I want to see more Battletoads.