Battletoads
PC, Xbox One
From a meme to a Phil Spencer T-shirt and now this, the return of Zitz, Rash and Pimple appears to have been willed into existence by the Internet. And the monkey’s paw has well and truly curled here: it’s hard to imagine anyone wanted a follow-up to Rare’s 1991 cult hit quite like this. Battletoads is a hot mess: ostensibly a side-scrolling beat-’em-up, but one that seems to tire of that idea halfway through, deciding instead to flit between genres to increasingly tiresome effect. Even if we bring ourselves to grudgingly admire its madcap energy, it’s like being shouted at for four hours by a hyperactive child hopped up on E-numbers. It’s about as funny, too, its relentless barrage of painfully try-hard wisecracks and self-referential gags consistently mistaking quantity for quality.
Pity, as there’s the germ of a half-decent, if formulaic, brawler here. The three Toads fall into familiar categories: strong and slow (Pimple), fast and light (Rash), good allrounder (Zitz). But the expressive cartoon animation creates an entertaining spectacle as they morph into drills and sharks, their limbs distending to giant proportions, and there’s a real sense of impact when the heaviest blows land. Alongside standard light attacks and juggle combos, you can spit bubblegum to stick individual enemies in place, or use your tongue to drag others towards you. You can snack on flies to recover health, too, though since the convoluted process involves pressing a trigger and a face button while pushing the analogue stick towards them, you’ll rarely have the room until you’re down to the stragglers.
Developer Dlala Studios rightly decides this isn’t quite enough on its own, but somehow determines that generic hacking minigames and inexplicably empty walks between encounters are the ideal pace-breakers. Then it gets bored of those, too, and decides Battletoads should be a mediocre twin-stick shooter for a while, interspersed with staggeringly bland puzzle-platformer sections in which you push crates onto pressure plates to open doors while leaping spiked pits and slow-moving hazards. The one thing these sequences have in common is that they’re overlong; likewise an into-the-screen homage to the original’s infamous tunnel section, which otherwise distinguishes itself by being slower and easier with more regular checkpoints. Small mercies.
A clutch of mildly amusing minigames – the best of which is the first, as the Toads find themselves stuck in menial jobs – are thrown in, but once they’re over we sigh as we prepare to sit through another few minutes of forced wackiness. Whatever its merits as a brawler, it’s safe to say that in years to come no one will be ringing up game shops to preorder this one.