Battletoads

Anyone looking for a classic beat em up rival is better off looking elsewhere. Battletoads is really anything but that. While the original was a very difficult beat em up, This Battletoads reboot is a blend of various genres (puzzle-solving and racing for example) and awful mini-games that annoyingly take up a nice chunk of the total levels in the game. In all honesty, Battletoads is very light on the beat em up aspect and while the change isn't terrible, It is still a disappointment.

You see, The campaign is about 3 hours long and that is being very generous. Most of the levels take less than 10 minutes to beat and when you couple that with these awful mini-game based levels (which honestly only take 2 or 3 mins to beat), It results in a game that is over way too quickly. You can't even really enjoy it before you are already finished with it. Within an hour of playing it, I was already more than halfway done with Act 2 out of the 4 total acts and it honestly felt like I hadn't even really got started with it in the first place. It's a major flaw with the game and a big reason why I rate it so low.

Now that's not to say that the controls are bad, which they aren't. The racing levels weren't that bad either and I certainly wouldn't have minded seeing more of those. I was a bit disappointed with how simple and straight-forward the "puzzle-solving" levels were. There was no challenge and it was incredibly light on the actual puzzle-solving, It was more like a simple platforming level and that was about it. The worst of the bunch are those incredibly pointless mini-games that do absolutely nothing for this game. I'd rather not have them included at all than waste my time on them. I really question why they were added in the first place. And it's such a frustrating part in the game seeing how little effort there was put into crafting a game that actually took time to beat rather than pad it with these stupid mini-games.

The only thing that the game truly does right is that they captured the characters perfectly. It brought a new life to them and the story was pretty decent. I love the animated cutscenes and honestly, I could totally see the Battletoads working as a cartoon. Especially if it was geared towards adult. It's the shining light of this rather disappointing game.

Overall: 5/10
The long-awaited reboot fails to live up to expectations. It's not even because it was a bad game. It's because it is an incredibly short game that only takes a couple of hours to finish. There's no substance, no replay value. The severe lack of depth is such a disappointment.