You'll hate its punishing difficulty, but you'll love everything else in this great and classic brawler.
Released by Rare around the peak of brawler video games like Double Dragon, Streets of Rage and River City Ransom, Battletoads is known for its great gameplay, rockin' tunes and the painful difficult that spikes around the third level.
Good: Great music * Lovable characters * Good graphics * Simple control * Intense action * Lengthy gameplay * Excellent co-op multiplayer
Bad: Extreme difficulty later on * No password/save features * Both players suffer if one messes up
Graphics: The NES usually isn't a console to mention graphics on, but there are a good handful of games that have exceptional design and visuals, Battletoads is one of them. The characters are attractive and well-detailed, environments were drawn out nicely, and just about everything else looks really good.
Sound/Music: What does Battletoads sound like when you're playing it? It sounds like an ass-kicking fest. Complete with explosions, punches and kicks, bashing monsters upside the head with blunt objects and much more. In a nutshell, everything you'd want to hear in a good brawler. The music has a lot of rock n' roll-style tunes, all of which are very catchy and great to listen to. Battletoads even has its own music during pause which might have you swaying and bumping with it.
Difficulty: Okay, I've talked about a lot of good with this game, time to get into one of the down-sides. While it's important for a game to be difficult and include a trial-and-error system, this is just unholy. The first level is very easy and is simple to breeze right through if you're familiar with how brawlers work. The second level ups the difficulty a bit and adds a bit of more challenge, even a new style of play. Third level comes around and it's back to the style of the first level, which is fine, it's good and dandy.. Until you get to the hoverbikes. Put it this way, it's like taking a walk through a nice little park and suddenly a huge, steep mountain appears right in front of you and you're forced to climb it, and you fall off and.. Well, figure the rest out yourself.
Gameplay: Gameplay is one of the best things of Battletoads, there's so much of it and several variations of styles: a side-scrolling platformer and brawler, then goes to vertical action, and then driving. There's even more styles than that. But I'll talk about the main style, brawling. If you've ever played Double Dragon, The Adventures of Bayou Billy, River City Ransom or similar games, you have the idea. If not, allow me to elaborate. You walk through the level until the screen stops and some enemies come at you. You may then approach them and throw a series of punches and other combos until all enemies are dead, and then continue on with the level. It's a simple concept and can be mastered rather quickly. A slight spoiler about the second level, it's a vertical downward-scrolling level in which you must descend with a rope, jumping from wall to wall avoiding obsticles and fighting off monsters that come at you. During the driving section of the third level, players must move up and down (from their perspective) to avoid walls and the like, take jumps to go over long pits that a simple jump wouldn't make, and jump over smaller pits. It starts out easy, but gets frustratingly evil within seconds. Overall, the gameplay for Battletoads is excellent and couldn't be better, but it could be a little easier maybe.
Control: There's a lot of different variations of play which I just talked about, so the controls have different functions. Generally, they work like this: use the D-pad to move around, B button to throw punches and the A button to jump. Start pauses, and select does nothing.
Overall: Well, we just went over both good and bad points of this game, but in the midst of it all, Battletoads is an excellent game worthy of its name and every penny spent on it, unless you have anger/anxiety issues and a very short temper. It's an unforgiving and evil game at times, but it's still enjoyable and great to play with a friend, as long as that friend doesn't keep dying, which will make you have to start over too if they run out of lives. It may be a long time before you beat it, but that doesn't mean you won't enjoy playing it, the unorthodox and evil difficulty will only motivate you to get better more and more. If you're an action/brawler freak who loves a challenge, you won't go wrong. Just.. Don't break your controller and go into cardiac arrest.