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Battletoads Release year - USA:1991 Company: Tradewest, Rare System: genesis Genre: Platformer, Beat 'em up Players: 1-2 |
Review by: PrimeOp
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| The Dark Queen and her minions have captured Princess Angelica and Pimple (the largest of the Battletoads) and it's up to Zitz and Rash to rescue them. The journey is mostly made up of beat-em-up stages with a healthy variety of other play styles sprinkled into the mix, like an auto-scrolling obstacle course and descending into a chasm by rope while fighting the enemy. That variety and the over-the-top attack system really give this game extra life. Arms, legs and heads transform into other objects (and animal parts) in mid-attack, enemies are dispatched in various Looney Tunes-like methods and the 'Toads do a hilarious slack-jawed, eye-popping gawk pose when faced with a boss that would make you soil your pants in real life. This game doesn't take itself seriously and that's part of it's charm. |  Beating up the 'walker' robots and using their broken parts to beat up more opponents is just one of the better features in the game. |
 If you look at the shadow, you can clearly see that the vehicle was on the other side of the road, yet it crashed anyway. This is also one of the more challenging areas of the game. | While it's mostly a straight-up remake of the NES game, the gameplay and controls don't seem as finely-tuned as the NES version. The collision boxes of the objects are done in a way to work against you, possibly even more than usual. You'll sometimes miss ledges that the 'Toad sprite clearly lands on and the speeder level can get cheap with the flickering preview barriers. The game isn't completely unfair, but can get as cheap as blue-light special on your green butt at the drop of a dime. The touch-up job on the graphics is hit or miss here. The Battletoads and most of the enemies don't look much better than the NES versions, but most of the backgrounds sport vast improvements. The Dark Queen, the final boss of the game, has the most major sprite upgrade to all 3 of her sprites. The music? It's decent and puts you in the brawling mood, but, sadly, no funky music when the game is paused. |
| Battletoads is an acquired taste as far as gaming goes. The game has a fun, cartoony look but the gameplay itself can become irritating with cheap hits and ledge misses that don't seem to be in the NES version as much as it is here. Of course, the graphics are better than the NES version, but many areas don't look that much better than the stellar 8-bit graphics of the original. I really had to give it a low score on control due to many of those cheapness issues. Still, if you really want a stiff challenge, you'll probably like this game. |
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