Battletoads (Xbox One)

Back in 1991, an NES game known simply as Battletoads found its way into the households of many a child. While it started off simple with it’s beat ’em up action, soon this game about muscular cartoon toads revealed itself to be an absolutely brutal genre mix which required memorization to overcome its unfair difficulty and proved to actually be impossible if played in two-player. It became a badge of honor to have finished this title, so when it came time to make a new game in the franchise, there was a legacy to live up to but also a completely new form of gaming audience who wouldn’t stick with a game that didn’t play fair. Dlala Studios rose to the challenge though, aiming to pay homage to the game’s ancestor while still adding a new spin to the affair to avoid being a full on retread.

 

Right out of the gate the game actually does a bit of both, the story’s start revealing that the Battletoads, Rash, Zitz, and Pimple, have spent the past 26 years since their last game Battletoads Arcade in a simulation. After spending 26 years in a virtual world meant to make them feel like heroes, they find adjusting to the mundane life in the real world a poor fit, a set of minigames letting the player see how awfully the toads integrate into galactic society. Looking for a way to become relevant again, the toads learn the location of their old nemesis the Dark Queen, but as they head off to beat her up because that’s just what heroes do to villains, they instead end up joining forces with her against an even greater threat. Uto and Pia, known collectively as the Topians, are a pair of almost all-powerful geometric beings who use their incredible abilities to rule over the galaxy, so this trio of has-been heroes and a washed up villainess set out to somehow take down these galactic overlords and get involved in many unusual situations along the way to such a lofty goal.

Playable with up to three players, the colorful animation featured during the action isn’t just a way of giving the gameplay a pretty face. Cutscenes in Battletoads can actually go on for quite a while and certainly feel like they’re meant to evoke an actual cartoon, although considering how raunchy and juvenile some of the humor gets it certainly seems like its appealing primarily towards teenagers. The gross out jokes are present but not overbearing as the game spends a lot of time exploring different avenues of humor, and while some things like letting the catty Topians ramble on as they fail to remember the name of the Battletoads can strain your patience, the game does have plenty of cute jokes and the four main players all start to develop some good character focused humor. In fact, the game actually structures itself so that the three main toads all have a segment devoted to them. Zitz tries to assert his leadership after the Dark Queen starts taking control of the team since she actually knows how to combat the Topians, Pimple tries to come to terms with his desire for a kinder nonviolent lifestyle, and Rash is desperate to capture the same level of fame they experienced in the simulation out in reality. It gives a good window into the three heroes, and the Dark Queen being a still ruthless villainess allows her to have some fun moments on the side of this mostly toad-focused narrative.

 

While Battletoads is a genre mix, the most prevalent style of play is a brawler, the three toads all playing quite differently. In the beat ’em up portions, Pimple will be a hard-hitting but slow powerhouse, Zitz can deliver hits most rapidly, and Rash sits at a comfortable middle-ground, but this seemingly standard layout for the toads only covers the basics of their differences. Most of your fighting will involve your regular X attacks stringing together in simple combos, but depending on when you press B, you can deliver a different type of Morph Attack. These powerful moves can have many attributes and are all unique to the toad performing them, the Battletoads actually having parts of their body shift into all kinds of creatures or objects to add emphasis to their blows. Zitz’s morph attacks are related to technology, Pimple’s powers all pull from heavy hitting objects, but Rash’s spread seems a little less clear. While you might see Zitz whip out an alien hog to ride instead of using machines for a morph attack, Rash not only draws on creatures like fish and chickens for attacks, but he can whip out an arcade cabinet. Regardless of what the moves are based on though, they all add some spice to the fighting with their delightful animations, and you still have a few other options that can give you an edge in battle. Your tongue can pull enemies towards you or you towards them, you have a charge attack that breaks through enemies who are defending, you have a very effective dodge maneuver, and in perhaps the oddest choice of attack you can spit gum on baddies to incapacitate them briefly.

There’s more to be mentioned like co-op play allowing you to revive the other toad and the tilted plane the battle takes place on sometimes having a background layer as well so you can pop between fights, but the important part is the combat actually has quite a bit going on mechanically and the fighting is satisfying for it. The enemies you go up against do feel like a good fit for letting you string together fun combos, but they also don’t have as much variety as you might hope. Some will force you to use your guard break or gum and the game does begin to throw in foes like a healer so you need to choose your targets well, but had Battletoads only been a beat ’em up it’s easy to see how these enemy types could get old. Strangely, the game bosses you fight with these controls rarely adhere to typical brawler battle types, the action mostly tied to dodging a string of powerful moves and then landing some hits when the foe has left themselves vulnerable. These fights are almost closer to a platform game because they focus less on what attacks you can do and more on those windows of opportunity, but they are interesting fights in their own way.

 

The combat probably doesn’t even make up half of Battletoads’s total play time though despite its solid design. Instead, Battletoads pursues many different forms of play, and this is where the game begins to show how difficult it is willing to get. The combat sections can be challenging, particularly the boss fights with their demanding dodging, but mostly they are a fun playground for smashing foes about. When you hop on the hoverbikes though, the game is expecting some fast-paced maneuvering from you with any crash an instant death. You’ll respawn at the last checkpoint during the bike sections thankfully, but the portions you need to clear before the next checkpoint are sometimes lengthy and demand a pretty solid performance to overcome. The bike segments are viewed from behind so you can see the walls ahead and adjust appropriately, although a devious late game section has these instead appear a bit suddenly. The early bike section is likely the first time you’ll encounter the game’s attempt to alleviate some of its difficulty though. While you get to pick an overall difficulty for the game, if a particular segment is leading to repeated failures, you eventually are given an invincibility option to let you overcome the trial. Depending on the gameplay style at the time this might not guarantee success so it’s not a free ride, the player still able to drop in pits during the bike portions for example. However, it does allow you to get past any genre style that might not be to your liking with less trouble, but save for the endgame where the game really cranks up its challenging design, invincibility doesn’t feel like it’s too much of a temptation for a devoted player.

 

The other genre styles you encounter in Battletoads have their highs and lows just like the bike levels. Some are simple minigames that are meant to come and go after basically just being playable jokes or a small diversion from the story’s main gameplay focus, but others will dominate a chapter. Pimple’s portion of the story actually features a good example of two playstyles that show the sometimes uneven nature of the game. Pimple and some side characters end up on a planet doing some fairly plain and unimaginative puzzle platforming that feels undercooked primarily because it’s not a major focus, the puzzles simple and the platforming only a little bit challenging. Meanwhile, the other toads are up in space flying their spaceship and engaging in shoot ’em up segments where they need to blast some surprisingly tough enemies. The enemy variety here is surprisingly strong and some foes even begin to shoot out bullets that resemble the patterns you’d expect to find in a bullet hell title, but with an effective dodge and free aim, this is actually a rather well designed execution of its gameplay style. The beat ’em up action is still the star of the show to be certain, but when it does step aside, you can usually expect one of three types of play:  equally good action in a different genre, an inoffensive minigame portion, or a section in a style that isn’t outright bad but still feels lacking.

THE VERDICT: Some well-written humor and stylish animation give Battletoads both character and appeal, and when you’re playing its combat sections or watching its numerous cutscenes this game is certainly at its best. The combat controls and variations between the toads can lead to snappy battles with plenty of opportunities for different attack approaches, but the only reason the simple enemies don’t get stale is the game pulls you away from this gameplay style to dig into different ideas for how you can play. Some of the genre deviations are simple yet cute minigames that tie into the plot, some of these are surprisingly well done like the space shooting, but others come up short as they don’t seem to have much thought put into them. Battletoads does keep delivering on amusing new directions both in its story and how you play through it, and with some systems in place to balance out the moments where it really cranks up the difficulty, we end up with a game that manages to remain entertaining and challenging for the most part.

 

And so, I give Battletoads for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. Whether it’s the humor or the action, Battletoads is defined by its attempts to keep exploring new directions. The jokes swing from referential to character-driven, immature to sarcastic, and absurd to surprisingly relatable. The beat ’em up action is certainly the most fleshed out mode of play and the best for it, but it manages successes with other genres it dabbles in and can shake off the weaker parts because they are counterbalanced by the more effective gameplay styles. The combat controls definitely had the makings of something that could have been an excellent beat ’em up game had the enemies been bumped up in their capabilities, but turning the focus elsewhere doesn’t hurt Battletoads so much as it shows that the game wants to explore a variety of ways to play. The invincibility option might not be the best solution to the difficulty spike found in its incredibly challenging late game moments and its better moments teeter on the precipice of being repetitive because the game’s overall substance had to be split apart rather than tightly focused, but the whole comes out to be an entertaining adventure because the right amount of attention was paid where it counts.

 

Dlala Studios broke away from the original Battletoads design aesthetic in both pursuing a new visual direction and adjusting how challenging play is handled, and while the shift can take a moment to digest, it does lead to a better experience than adhering too closely to the first game’s infamous brutality. This 2020 return to the series packs some punchy combat and makes the toads into a fun and interesting trio who you like to see in the surprisingly stuffed cutscenes, and while the difficulty can still feel a little rough at parts, Battletoads does provide some challenging moments on top of giving you a variety of different ways to play. Much like the toads, the game morphs into all kinds of unexpected forms, and while not all of them are effective, it’s still a fun ride seeing what shape things will take.