Quick Look: Battletoads

I’m not into the art design

I like the animation

It actually plays pretty well, but some of the sequences go too long and the enemies have too much health (playing solo, it feels like they didn't scale it down accordingly).

Honestly, with some more balancing and editing, if this game was an hour shorter I would've been a lot more into it. As it stands, a decent Game Pass download.

Looks like a horrible game that hates the people who bought it. Hard pass.

Wait this is out? Also it's August 28th???

At the 9:00 mark when he removes his shades. My goodness his eyes make me so comfortable.

@csl316: Ya, I'm not really seeing how/why Jeff and others shit on this game so much. Looks like a solid 7/10 game pass download to me. I will admit, I haven't actually played it yet, so maybe it feels bad. Personally, I kind of dig the early 00's cartoon animation style though.

Maybe it's an age thing IDK.

I enjoyed the game. Played it single player on default difficulty. I don't think it was that hard personally. Not a walk in the park for sure. I did hate it until I got past the first stage. Then it started growing on me.

I finished and enjoyed this. I'd have been happy if I'd dropped £10 on it, but glad I got it on Gamepass.

This quick look doesn't show the game in a good light imo, they're not using all the tools/moves available to them.

Give it a go and make up your own mind :)

I wish they would play more if it. The game really turns around when you get to the Geometry Wars section.

I'd say give it a shot if you have gamepass. I did, and i hated it. I simply did not have fun playing it and think its hideous. That's just me though, other people might enjoy the combat and i wouldnt fault them for it

This game is a dumpster fire when played solo since it feels like the enemy numbers and health don't really scale - so battles take twice as long if you're going it alone.

Grab one couch co-op buddy though, and if both players get a handle on the tagging and reviving system the game really, really sings. Tagging out a toad lands right on top of the downed toad (which you can then revive to half health) so as long as both players aren't knocked out at the same time you won't trigger a team wipe while players rotate toads, which goes a long way in improving the pace of the game itself (which already has generous checkpointing for brawling sections).

I actually really like the combat system because of how loosey-goosey it is, with its infinite omnidirectional dashing, omnidirectional grappling etc. and just smaller things, like how you don't have to wait a whole-ass second for enemies to get back up to continue your combo like you have to for other brawler games. I think if people go into this combat system playing it the same way they would other beat-em-ups they're going to get extremely frustrated like Jason seems to be. (To wit, some have pointed out how the brawling kind of evokes Devil May Cry)

I think the aesthetic and humour are definitely going to be polarizing. Its storytelling gets pretty viciously self-deprecating and it does emulate the modern Saturday morning cartoon look to a tee. When the game fills up the screen with tons of enemies, it does have a legitimate readability issue because of how lavish the art and animation is. I think the idea that this is somehow an irredeemably bad game is a bit unfair though, to be honest - it has a very elaborate, deliberate design (that the developers obviously in put a lot of care and attention to detail) which is going to resonate strongly with some players and completely turn off others.

One example that I can bring to mind immediately is that in the hacking minigames are actually pretty elegant and engage both players in light puzzle-solving, timing and coordination, but players could very easily be turned off by how it brings the pace of the stage progression to a grinding halt.

At times it was really hard to tell what's going on, probably because the sprites change in size so much and so quickly and the contrast between foreground and background is pretty weak.

That 23 minutes is obviously including all the times Jason died, you can see that if you do it all in one go without failing, it will take less than 8:30, since there's a reward for doing that. That still is a little too long, but it's not 23 minutes either.

Maybe doing a quicklook on the hardest difficulty gives an incorrect impression of the average gameplay.

This game isn't as hard as Jason's masochism makes it appear to be.

This game is like a crime against existence. It seems to perfectly emulate the style and tone of the original game and its cartoon, but that's a bad thing. A very bad thing.

@puppykisses: Jason said the setting was on the default difficulty, and that switching the difficulty setting is not available on the fly.

@puppykisses: It was on Normal difficulty.

I don't *hate* the art style in this game, at the very least - but I sure do wish it had more frames of animation or something to it?

On top of you know, the gameplay not exactly seeming to be fantastic due to the difficulty design.

Is this battletoads

The art style is not bad - a very competent rendition of somewhat modern Saturday morning cartoons - but it misses the mark SO MUCH as a Battletoads game. The color palette, the vibe etc. It's all very different. Even the music feels "wrong"; too much shrill guitar shredding, not enough catchy buttrock riffs (which was a core ingredient to the flow of the old games).

And hell, the movement still looks like the Toads wade through molasses. Didn't they already speed it up or something after the first reactions when they revealed the game? The speed of the music is also at odds with what's happening on screen.

Looks like a faithful adaptation of a NES game where they carried on the bad/limited design of the originals instead of building on top of it. There is no reason the vehicle segments should be so long, seems tedious and the game play doesn't seem compelling. The writing and the voice acting seems poor, so it seems to be a easy pass on this one.

I'm not surprised at all.

This actually seems really solid? Was expecting this to be on fire after Jeff’s impressions.

The Battletoads legacy has been preserved:

Cool idea in a bad game.

Between the screenshake, the high-bloom lighting effects and the fact that every character is changing shape every second, I feel like it would be *impossible* to tell what's going on-screen at any given moment.

Also, this kind of feels like it's riding on the coat-tails of Double Dragon Neon 8 years after the fact. :b

The animations and the humor is pretty decent... Surprisingly!

Sadly the actual game doesn't hang.

I *love* the animation in this game - some of the most solid stuff done in the western style (by westerners?) I've seen in quite some time. Ironically, the fluidity and changing shapes of everything does make it visually difficult to read what is going on.

The animation is good. The character design when it is idle looks like it came from an early 2000s Flash game. The drawbacks of nostalgia is that it was no as good as you remember it was. Can we finally call Battletoads a Ninja Turtle ripoff?

The animation and sprite work is pretty impressive. But it also looks like it gets in the way of itself. There's so much going on visually, attack animations go on so long, effects layer on top of each other, obscuring potentially important cues,.. the result is a mess. I couldn't tell what was going on during any of the battles. The dialog and humor is *really* bad. Maybe that's "intentional" but that sounds like a cop-out. The voices might be the most surprisingly rough thing to me. Maybe remote work during the pandemic meant team members actually had to record lines in their bedroom closets, but that doesn't really account for how embarrassingly cringe the "acting" is.

I'm not an expert on beat-em-ups so I wouldn't be a good judge of the "feel" of the gameplay and I haven't really played any of the original Battletoads games to appreciate the difficulty or nods. But it just seems like it's trying to be bad on purpose, because the Battletoads brand is such a meme, that I don't see myself enjoying this at all.

I literally cannot even tell what is happening. I can barely keep track of where Brad or Jason's characters are at any given time during a fight. It has a style but it's also a total mess.

They need to stop trying to make these a thing

Like others have already said:

The animation and soundtrack is the main positives of this game. But unfortunately, it IS a Battletoads game in all of its infamy, meaning the difficult hover bike segment is there (the second stage), and the fighting becomes tedious and repetitive. Also the stages really drag causing bad pacing, something Streets of Rage 4 did very well. The presentation is enough to finish the game, since its not very long. But out of all the recent great Brawlers that have come out in the last couple of years, this game overall is the weakest one yet.

This is one of those quicklooks that doesn’t really represent the game. It’s a weird game. Humor is all over the place, 75% of the game isn’t even a beat-em-up...

As a fellow old man, however, I will say that it’s not nearly as difficult as they’re making it look, so I wouldn’t let that dissuade you if you watch this. Maybe gamespass will help this thing find an audience. I enjoyed it just for the sheer ‘wtf is going on here’ aspect of it.

Watching this has the same effect on me as watching the Street of Rage IV QL. All it does is just make me wanna play/watch/listen to the old games.

So I decided to rewatch the Battletoads episodes of GameCenter CX. In case anyone's interested, they're on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/game-center-cx-season-15/Game+Center+CX+132+-+Battletoads.avi