Both types are sterile, bare-bones representations of their respective genres you blast oncoming ships and then push boxes around in simple puzzles. Instead of establishing mechanics and building on them, the game sends you through a series of shallow detours.įor example, the third act (of four acts total) has you alternating between two kinds of stages: One is a top-down space shooter, and the other is a 2D platformer. But that variety doesn’t translate into entertainment whether you are beating up aliens, shooting spaceships, or hacking door locks, Battletoads is profoundly uninteresting. This reboot embraces the same philosophy, bouncing players between different activities for brief minigames or entire levels. The classic Battletoads games are traditionally remembered as brawlers, but they also experimented with other gameplay styles, like the infamous turbo bike tunnel. Does this reboot strike a successful balance between old and new? That’s a fair question, but it’s so far down the list of problems that it’s also irrelevant. The biggest and most pervasive issue is much simpler: Battletoads just isn’t fun. That’s a peculiar cocktail for a side-scrolling brawler, and a challenging one to reimagine for a modern audience. The Battletoads were products of a strange era, sitting at the intersection ‘90s ‘tude, gross-out cartoons, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phenomenon.

Download battletoads 1991