Battletoads

"It's nothing different from the NES version, and Streets of Rage has nothing to worry about!"

Oh boy, you have just got to love a game that features ass kicking toads in a Double Dragon and Streets of Rage style setting in which you battle in the side scrolling fashion that you have played through before. The plot of the story is relatively used and abused, but focuses on three super toads that are looking to get their girlfriend back from the Dark Queen. While the plot of the game is relatively old and dusty, the game play that you face while fighting through the game is first rate beat ‘em up action with plenty of different action sequences to encounter! You’ll find that the game revolves around being able to throw down some heavy dusty fighting moves, piloting a hover bike and falling down a huge hole with a rope being your only means of slowing down. What you encounter along the way are instances of a game trying to match what the popular Double Dragon and Streets of Rage series did, but in all reality making a hard action game with plenty of fighting to go around and enough differences to set it apart from the Streets of Rage series!

The game play is strictly side scrolling mayhem with plenty of fighting and variation to go along with it. Controlling one of three huge toads, you’ll race through eight stages of butt kicking mayhem and violence that spans not only side scrolling, but vertical and driving sequences, all of which pack plenty of action! Through your fighting, you’ll punch your enemy to death, but if your enemy is weakened just enough, you’ll throw out a super punch that will knock them clear across the stage. Little game play additions like this make variation on other side scrolling fighting games something to remember, and there is no shortage of it. In other stages, you’ll have to fall down a large hole in which bouncing your enemy off the wall is strangely reminiscent of Wild 9 and in the driving stages, you’ll run down your enemies with the use of a bad ass hover cycle! With the different attacks that you can perform, you can also throw your enemies around the stage, head butt them into next week and pick up broken off limbs to use them as weapons. All of these different options that you may find through the game will increase the amount of overall destruction that you want to cause while leaving it simple enough to play and pick up with a little practice.

The control is another feature that makes the game desirable in which none of the modes that you may run into never really changes. However, you may find that the fighting control suffers from what I like to call Ghost Control. This is what happens when you go to use the control, and especially with the jumps, the precision is so far off that you end up dying or causing more damage to yourself than what you were aiming for! In the later levels, you’ll need to have precision controls, that that is something that the Genesis controller as well as the NES controller just doesn’t offer you with the way that you have to use precise timing and otherwise. Such problems come up quite frequently in games like this, so if you’re used to the difficult control, then you should have no problem playing through this title with what it has to offer!

Visually, Battletoads is a game that doesn’t suffer from much save for a little fuzziness and occasionally some image break up when you’ve run into a screen full of enemies! You’ll find that game moves and is detailed pretty well, but it still doesn’t come close to being as detailed as Streets of Rage is, with plenty of detail in all of the right spots. The stages themselves are all something out of a comic book it seems, and the little details that you would expect to see really don’t come up all that often. When you boil it all down, the more important special effects that you find will be with the super punches and kicks in which your fighter seems to have an immediate swelling of an appendage and your target goes flying into the distance! Where the game suffered in the NES version, the Genesis doesn’t seem to suffer from the same sort of image break ups and different slow downs that the NES was plagued with.

The audio in Battletoads is something a little less than stellar; in which your main music has a rock type of beat to it and accompanies you throughout the entire game. The sound effects are a standard fare of thuds and crunches with some pretty interesting slams when you slam an enemy into the ground or wall! The game music here in Battletoads for the Genesis is slightly different than it is in the NES version, so if you’ve played the other game, then you’ll notice that the Genesis version seems to have a little more direction and plenty of mood setting themes that you’ll find go well with the different sound effects in the game. Now if you’re expecting something widely different than the NES version, then stop expect so much because this is just a simple port over to the Genesis.

Battletoads isn’t a bad game by any means and can really cause a break in the standard Double Dragon style game play by offering you new enemies and different character to fight with. If you add into the fact that the game has plenty of challenge and a very hard difficulty level, you’ll find that expertise in the Double Dragon and Streets of Rage series is a must! Breaking away from the monotony that Double Dragon and its series gives you, you’ll find that Battletoads is a game that is worthy of the side scrolling beat ‘em up crown, with simplistic visuals and sound. What will catch most gamers is the fact that the game is so hard to control in some spots, and then different instances of Ghost Control is enough to make you whip the controller at the screen! If you can get past this, then you’ll have a rather enjoyable game that is worth collecting and having in the Genesis library. Collectors would do well to pick this game up simply because of the challenge that it presents and side scrolling action fans will have little, if anything to complain about once you’ve really dove into the game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/28/01, Updated 12/28/01