Like a Buzzsaw Nutshot

Fans of the NES will remember Battletoads. Whether they remember it fondly is a different matter. The game is ridiculous. It’s silly, cartoony, and over-the-top, like a distilled version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja TurtlesOriginally dreamed up as a parody of Marvel's Daredevil comics (going so far as to basically reproduce to opening shots of that comic's hero gaining his powers), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles not only launched a sudden boom of anthropomorphic fighting animal comics but have, themselves, starred in multiple comics series, TV shows, and movies. but with even more attitude on top. But more than that, what players will likely remember is that the game was hard. Really, incredibly hard. It’s likely most players were able to get through the first couple of stages, fighting monsters in a brawling stage and then skimming down a rope in a tower stage. But very few ever got past the third stage, the infamous Turbo Tunnel, which claimed many lives and left many a controller thrown to the ground. And there were still close to a dozen stages after that most players never even saw.

That first game came out and took the NES market by storm, and very quickly developer Rare and publisher Tradewest had a massive hit on their hands. Sequels quickly followed on the Game Boy, SNES, Sega Genesis, and in arcades. None, however, quite captured the magic of the original. What started as a flash of toad-scented lightning in 1991 quickly petered out by 1994, and it seemed like that was it for the Battletoads. A quick flash of inspiration sprinkled with hardcore difficulty, and then just a memory of what once was.

In 2020, though, the series was back. Developed by Dlala Studios (with some assistance from Rare) and released exclusively for Xbox One and Windows, the new game, titled simply Battletoads, was the first new entry in the series in 26 years. That was a long time for any game series to take, and one would assume that with all that time off, all the years spent letting ideas brew and develop, that a new game in the series would be released only if it could truly recapture the magic of the original. Fast, fun, frenetic, and insanely difficult, that was what fans of the series were promised, and what the game had to deliver.

It failed. A commercial failure as well as a massive disappointment to fans, the new Battletoads didn’t recapture any of the magic of the original. If anything it felt like a pale copy that didn’t understand the assignment. The original Battletoads was a game that never sat still, always came up with new ideas. No two stages were the same, each was progressively weirder and more difficult, and the game never let you catch your breath or figure out what was going on before the heat was on and you had to move. The new game, though, was repetitive, slow, and boring. It tried to copy the ideas of the original but didn’t know what to do with them and, in the end, it felt like a failed mess. What could have been the promise of a new wave of Battletoads titles instead died with a fizzle.

The game takes place 26 years after their last adventure, with the former galactic hero Toads discovering that. They’ve been trapped in an underground bunker, living a fantasy version of their former lives. When the illusion breaks, the Toads emerge to discover they’re no longer heroes at all, that no one even remembers them. Worse, because of that, they all have to get office jobs and work like normal people to pay the bills. This simply will not stand for these formerly-heroic amphibians.

Deciding that they had to recapture their former glory, the three Toads – Zits, Pimple, and Rash – head out on an adventure to track down their former nemesis, the Dark Queen. But when they reach her they discover that she’s not really the villain anymore. Years prior her powers were stolen by a race of evil aliens, the Topians, who just so happened to be the same beings that trapped the Toads in their fantasy simulation. Working together, the Toads and the Queen venture off to find the Topians and end their evil reign once and for all.

The first issue that Battletoads 2020 runs into is that it thinks it’s funny. It spends a lot of time stopping the progress of the game to have the characters talk to each other, in interstitial moments or full cut-scenes. Not only do these moments cut into the action and slow everything down, they’re also tedious and not interesting. The Toads crack lame jokes that often barely even read as jokes at all. It’s like the writers for the game thought they were funny and no one had the heart to tell them that their script was as dull as a twice-reheated Lifetime movie three-quel. Any time the Toads talked, I wished they’d just shut up.

The leaden pace doesn’t just come in from the characters, though. Nothing about this game is zippy. For a game that’s nearly 30 years older than the original title, built on modern hardware, this game feels positively sluggish in comparison to the NES original. And fair or not, that’s what we have to compare it to. While the sequels were never as good as the original NES title, this is a revival meant to recapture the glory days (hell, that’s literally the plot of the newer game), given the same name as the original title, and it can’t even compare in gameplay or speed.

For starters, the combat is slow. A bunch of enemies will pill on screen, and both they and the hero move at a sedate pace. While the combat isn’t bad, with hits, jumping hits, dash attacks, and more, none of it feels precise and aggressive. It lacks the oomph of the original titles combat, which the original game was smart enough to limit to only a couple of stages. That felt precise and interesting, with enemies getting defeated quickly and the action never lingering. All Battletoads 2020 knows how to do is linger, on and on, with combat that’s slow on stages that take long minutes to complete. It feels so sluggish.

The original game also broke up the action and constantly shifted game modes. Battletoads 2020 doesn’t do that. You go from a combat stage to a turbobike stage (which also moves far more slowly than it should) and then back to what feels like an endless series of combat sections for the whole first half of the game. Yes, occasionally there’s a tiny puzzle to solve, or a couple of sessions of the truly obnoxious Toadshambo (which is just Rock-Paper-Scissors and equally as random), but it’s so much of the slow combat that never feels good. Things do change in the back half where the combat sections are replaced with a long run of platforming sections instead, which at least feel a little better even if these stages are just as long and tedious, only now they’re broken up by repetitive space combat sections. And then another turbobike section before we get to the final fight.

Where is the variety? Where is the constantly changing style of play that keeps you on your toes. I was never on my toes at all. I paid for the seat and I used every inch of it. This game didn’t thrill me at all. What should have been a constant mix of weird ideas thrown at the players each and every time a stage shifted instead because an endless repeat of the same ideas, broken up by tired mini-games that would have made the game better if they’d been removed entirely. Nothing about this experience was fun or interesting.

But I think the most galling aspect of the game is the fact that it has difficulty levels. I know that sounds silly because, sure, the developers want players to experience the game. But this is Battletoads, a series known for its hard-as-nails difficulty and unrelenting pressure. Having an easy mode of the game strips away the one thing that defined the series. Worse, even though you can crank it up to hard mode, it still never feels as difficult as the original NES. Not as fun, not as varied, and not as hard.

No doubt, in every form, this is the worst possible experience that could have been handed to classic Battletoads fans. It delivers none of the things they want from one of these games, instead giving a bland and watered down corporate vision for how these cartoon characters should act in the real world. If this is all that Microsoft and its subsidiaries can come up with to expand the franchise it would have been better if they’d left it dead after 26 years. The memories were better than what Battletoads 2020 gives us.