“The combat isn’t too deep or elaborate but it can be a blast thanks to combos using the basic attack on the X button, launching enemies into the air with Y, and jumping with A to juggle airborne enemies with continued attacks. The story itself is simple – the Battletoads want to be famous again – but it’s a lot of fun and bolstered by the great voice cast. It’s often said that it’s hard to do comedy in games, but these characters play wonderfully off of each other and got quite a few boisterous laughs out of me. The Toads all have distinct personalities: Rash is a fame-starved idiot who wears sunglasses indoors, Pimple is large and sensitive, and Zitz is the self-declared leader and the smartest of the group. Presented in a great Saturday morning cartoon style, the Battletoad trio of Rash, Zitz, and Pimple have been trapped in a virtual reality hole, living out a life where they’ve been worshiped as heroes for the past 26 years. It takes the legendarily awful difficulty of the original and makes it into something that’s actually enjoyable for its short run – and you can still crank up the challenge if you want.It sounds weird to say, especially for this notoriously narratively light genre, but one of the biggest things that kept me enticed was the story. But Battletoads (2020) is mostly the exact opposite: it’s a simple but fun and fair three-player beat ‘em up with enough humor and personality to drive a spin-off TV show – which I would totally watch if they made it.

Awkward and stiff controls paired with an unfair difficulty that requires a level of precision and reflexes that those controls don’t allow is a terrible combination for a beat-em-up, and its heroes felt like uninspired TMNT knock-offs. Brace yourselves for some truth: Battletoads – the 1991 game for the NES – is bad.

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