Battletoads Reboot (Patreon)

Ah, Battletoads, the Street Sharks of the Gaming World. Not all Ninja Turtle rip-offs are created equal. For every S.W.A.T. Kats, there's a Wild C.A.T.s. Writing that sentence gave me an aneurysm so i hope you can survive reading it. My point is Battletoads was always one of the cool ones. 

What are the Battletoads? Are they mutants? Aliens? Brothers? Nobody really knows. But the games were awesome. I'm particularly fond of the crossover game Battletoads/Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team, that's one of the best games ever made. 

I was initially hype for the reboot, then i was un-hyped when i saw the shitty art style and un-sexy heavily clothed Evil Queen, then i forgot about it entirely, then i saw it was on X-box and was like, oh yeah, they rebooted that didn't they?

Well i gave it the old college try and it's not bad, but it's not great either. The dialogue and cutscenes are actually pretty funny, and give the Toads a lot of personality they didn't really get to show before. But the gameplay is just too much. The old games were simple. Simple moveset, cool animations, weapon pick ups, and all kinds of different platforming challenges and gimmick levels like rappelling and bike crashing. 

But this is a modern game so it thinks it has to improve the combat by adding to it. So you've got a bunch of different button combinations for different moves, and enemy types that only certain moves work against, and a bunch of other shit i don't feel like explaining here. It's a mess, and quickly begins to feel convoluted. 

To justify the "expanded" (bloated) combat options the enemy count is increased to waves after waves of spongy enemies which drags the whole game out and makes everything tedious as fuck. Typical modern game design padding. The old games can be beaten in 45 minutes if you know what you're doing, and they're perfect. Enemies are there to get the shit kicked out of them and pounded into the fucking floor, not to mob you for 20 minutes every 5 steps while you rack up a meaningless combo counter. Yawn. Chugging Nyquil is more exciting. In fact i'm asleep just thinking about it.