Battletoads tries too hard for its own good It exhausted me, and despite all the effort, I never found Battletoads fun. The animations, enemies, and toads are all silly, absurdist, and weird, with each toad transforming into various animals, machines, or robots mid-combo.īut the game’s over-complicated mechanics and oppressive art style tried too hard to keep my attention. And thus, the Battletoads formula cemented itself.Īs we progressed through the rest of the game’s first act - which took about two hours - we played a few more beat-’em-up levels, another silly minigame, and a boss fight. The two of us rode at high speeds through a long tunnel, jumping over and dodging between obstacles. The third stage took us into a flying motorcycle level.

Stage 2 wasn’t much of a stage at all, opting for a silly storytelling vignette of the Battletoads doing menial jobs to make ends meet - which just forces some simple button presses to finish the minigame. After we’d learned the basics, the first mission tossed us into a battle against a giant pink pig that we nearly mistook for TMNT’s Bebop. There’s the standard punch, an uppercut to finish near-death enemies or juggle them, a charge attack to break shields, a tongue lasso to pull enemies nearby or pull me to them, and the ability to slow enemies by spitting gum. Battletoads taught us a variety of different techniques.

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