After being announced last year we’ve heard surprisingly little about the new Battletoads. Thankfully, we finally got see just what developers Dlala Studios have been doing with the franchise at Microsoft's Xbox E3 2019 briefing. Pimple, Rash and Zitz are back once again in a three-player side-scrolling co-op beat-em-up and they’re sporting a brand new look.
With wonderful 2D hand drawn animations each of the characters are much more expressive. Their bespoke animations allow them to show off their own personalities in style, even down to they way they strut across the screen. The new art style allows the developers to really expand on the series’ signature attitude and sense of humour.
We managed to get some hands-on time with the game and can confirm that it’s just as fun as we remember. Each character still has the same over-the-top special moves and combos but now have a handful of new tricks up their sleeves. As well as a new dash ability, you can launch enemies into the air, and use an area of effect ability that will attack multiple enemies. Each player can also now use their tongue to pull enemies towards them, or even pull themselves towards the enemy making each battle much more exciting and dynamic.
It’s wonderful to see that Dlala studios are doing such a great job of bringing back such a beloved franchise and doing everything they can to evolve the gameplay. We just hope the racing sections aren’t as brutally hard as they have been in previous entries.
Sadly, Microsoft is yet to set a firm Battletoads release date, but we're hoping to see it surface on Xbox One and PC (and Xbox Game Pass!) before the end of 2019.
