I hate that I specifically asked for this. In my review of Battletoads, I remarked that it was a shame how the crunchy combat mechanics went underutilized in favor of platforming challenges and gimmick levels. Well, here ya go. An entire Battletoads game that's almost non-stop combat. It's awful. One of the most unenjoyable games I have ever played on the NES.
This crossover game with Double Dragon acts as a sequel to the last game. The Dark Queen is up to something once again and has now recruited a gang of street brawlers to her cause. The Battletoads set out to stop her with reinforcements of their own; Billy and Jimmy.
The Double Dragon influences are mainly cosmetic. Billy and Jimmy are playable, but their moveset and models are reworked to be more like Battletoads. Likewise you have a variety of thugs mixed in with the sci-fi monsters in sci-fi stages. It looks more than a little odd to be fighting Abobo in outer space while playing as an oversized frog on steroids.
To start on a positive note: the game looks incredible. The sprite work enjoys a level of detail rarely seen in 8-bit games. Each stage has a unique atmosphere to it and enemies look simply amazing. When you then also see the animations, you'd almost forget that you're playing on a Nintendo Entertainment System. They even tackled my issues with the original Battletoads, where some of the high-speed segments would cause a nauseating scrolling effect on backgrounds. I had no issues at all throughout this game.
Its first 2 levels also seemed promising. They were decently-challenging and briskly-paced. I was especially fond of a brief callback to the Turbo Tunnel, now with a much more enjoyable level of difficulty.
Level 3 is where Battletoads & Double Dragon changes gears though. Each stage becomes a grind to get through. They are so incredibly long and you need to deal with the same hazards over and over again. Level 3 has countless hallways with combat encounters and traps, interspersed with multiple iterations of the same platforming challenges. Level 4 is an Asteroids reference where you fight a spaceship, but it just keeps going on and on with new weapons appearing. Level 5 is another long stroll down a linear stage, with the same mini-boss repeated 3 times. It is so unbelievably repetitive. I kept wondering to myself: "Am I still on this bloody stage!"
This repetition also highlights how I was off in my Battletoads review. The game had satisfying combat, but only when fights were sporadic. The fact that they were few and far between kept it novel. Now that Battletoads & Double Dragon has combat all over, it reveals how shallow the mechanics actually are.
You can't do anything except mash out the same combos over and over again. There are no special moves to do or tactical options to consider; you just punch whatever is in front of you. This becomes annoying because there are way too many enemies and they take too long to deal with. You need to land 2 full combos on any enemy before they actually stay down and each 1 is a sluggish action to pull off. Any little hit also interrupts you and it's trivial for enemies to stunlock you if you get surrounded.
Without a second player, it becomes a matter of isolating foes so you can button-mash them to death before their mates intervene. A process that is rendered annoying by their AI. It prefers to keep a distance from you unless it can rush in to get a cheap shot. They even tend to leave the arena completely so you can't attack them, then reemerge when you focus on another enemy.
And again, you're going to be doing fights like this non-stop for levels that keep stretching on for an eternity. Run out of lives at any point and you're going to be restarting from the beginning of that stage.
I was about ready to give up on level 6. Its boss is a cheap motherfucker whose attacks have a longer range and faster windup than yours. He dashes all over the arena and there's no recovery period to any of his moves. He can charge at you and miss, but then already pull off a grapple or stunlock you with punches before you can counterattack. Even with turbo on, he'd regularly find gaps between my punches to start up a combo of his own. It was an infuriating battle that definitively soured what fondness I had for the game. Though it and level 7 were at least gracefully short compared to prior stages.
Even more so than its predecessor, Battletoads & Double Dragon feels like a cheap attempt at garnering notoriety through difficulty. Regular Battletoads did this through its merciless gimmick stages, whereas this game settles on being a death march. Outside of bragging rights for having beaten it, this game offers no joy whatsoever. It's a tedious mashfest of an action game characterized by its many annoyances.
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