I’m not exactly sure what I’m calling Battletoads 2020. A long-awaited sequel? A spiritual reboot? A love letter to an old classic whose most memorable quality was that hardly anyone could beat it? In any case, it feels good to play in short bursts, but their humor and chaos overwhelm it.
I wanted it new Battletoads, which came out today on Xbox One and PC, to feel like drawing a Saturday morning in the ‘90s, complete with a sugary bowl of nut and short game prints during commercial breaks. There are flashes of that in Dlala Studios’ tribute to the arcadey beat’em up series – which Rare, the developer of the original games, assisted – but more often it feels like the kind of soul-crushing day job the titular pads are trying to escape.
Battletoads is built in four acts and can be beaten in about three to five hours, depending on how good you are at avoiding obstacles and mashing combinations. In it, you play as three frogs, Rash, Zitz, and Pimple, who are born to fight. After nearly three decades of just being freed from a computer simulation, they now have to turn things around as they scroll from left to right to give meaning to their late capitalist lives.
Like its predecessors, it certainly has jokes. Some of them land sometimes – for example, after defeating a boss in the tutorial, he says something to the effect of “I’ll see you in hell”, only to die and then discover that there is no people’s life is and this time on earth is all we get. ‘Yikes,’ exclaims one of the toads, and yes, I grin.
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But more often, the hampered jokes feel more of the “get a load of these wild and crazy frogs, folks” variety. Somewhere on the trails, they rent hover bikes and then throw them away when the owner throws a fit and threatens to bomb them. Poor boy. The jokes also come so quickly and so often that they unpack an otherwise short and sweet story of redemption and save the world in a Saturday morning care. I wanted to kick, punch, and jump, but I was also overwhelmed with puns, current gags, and meta references.
But kicking, hitting, and jumping is good. It feels precise and muscular, from Pimple’s heavy snails to Zitz’s rapid pummeling, with every hit in a combo feeling responsive and recording like a fist of clever snaps crashing on the sidewalk. Frogs can charge their attacks to break enemy shields, or step out of the way to repel attacks. All of that also feels tight. Every time I came out of a cut and threw other anthropomorphized creatures, I felt good – at least at first. Mar Battletoads likes to just snake with plain enemies, the same way it jumps randomly long platforming, shoot’em up, and other sequences of minigames throughout your entire adventure. The arcade nostalgia quickly turns to chaos, and then tedium, as the same course of action repeats itself from screen to screen, just with different, though lushly animated, comic books.
What I’m describing may sound like the typical concept of a classic beat’em up, but it feels like other games have nailed this retro experience better this summer, from the unexpectedly substantial River City Girls to the beautiful back-to-basics revival, Streets of Rage 4. Battletoads feels busy when he misses variety, and is too enamored with his own legacy to bring something new to the table. There is coop with three players, but it is only local. While collaborating to chuck enemies back and forth across the screen can be fun, it starts to fall apart when Battletoads‘Achieved difficult driving levels as other challenging platforming comes into play.
When it was 1993 again and my grandparents had my cousins and me the new ones Battletoads on a Friday night, we would soon bail and go back Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time. But it’s 2020, so instead people can try it for free if they’m already a paid Game Pass subscriber. I wish I could say without reservation that it was definitely worth a try. Maybe Battletoads just happens to ignore the arcade grind ’90s all too well. It’s been a few quarters of an hour, but I do not intend to return anytime soon.
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