Battletoads in Battlemaniacs

The Good

The Bad

The Bottom Line
Being a Battletoads fan (and who isn’t?) I am deeply dissatisfied with this game. There is almost no creativity to the game itself. It only consists of six stages and a bonus stage (reused twice), and from all this content only the bonus stage is original. All other stages reuse themes and gameplay mechanics from the Battletoads game. And it surely is inferior to the original. It is short, it is even more unforgiving, and it is very unfair at certain points. What was the point of this? Why not just make a port of the original game like Rare did for Mega Drive?

The biggest problem with gameplay is that the action is kind of zoomed in. Huge sprites sure look nice, but you can’t see what’s ahead of you. The whole game, except for the first level, is racing of this or that type (jets, snakes or kamikaze bomber rat), you are required to make hundreds of decisions fast or die. And with sprites so big you just don’t have enough room to react! Your only weapon against this game is memorization. You don’t get many lives and later levels have no checkpoints, so your lives don’t even matter. The best you can do is memorize the whole game, and it is even worse than it was in the original - in that game you could change your tactics here and there...

And don’t even start on that awful-looking Master System port…(which surprisingly has difficulty settings and overall is easier).