Eight action-packed, side-scrolling stages of Toad fun lie before you in this one-player game. Having such a varied line-up of levels was stupid (you can't help thinking that if they'd got the beat-'em-up bit right and moderated the rest into sub-games, it wouldn't be quite so bad) and I give up.The evil Dark Queen has captured a Princess. There are programming bugs (jump over a gap and the screen might not scroll in time to let you over you can kill baddies off-screen, and sometimes even walk off yourself), there are blatant design flaws (you can fall off the edge of level one -great) and the manual is awful, filling you in for eight pages on the toads' ages, history, hobbies, favourite flavours of Cornetto, etc, and then cramming the controls into seven lines (with no mention of how to barge into people on level one, or how to turn into a bashing ball while swinging down the ropes on level two). The sprites are tiny with only three frames of animation, the scrolling brings tears to the eyes, the sound effects are so bad they'd make a Speccy blush, and (if you haven't already thrown a brick through the screen in disgust at the appalling backdrops) the music would have you seriously considering ripping the speaker out of your television. The first is a scrolling beat-'em-up, very much a poor man's Golden Axe (walk up to baddies and press Fire), the second is like that bit in Ghostbusters 2 (the game) where you are lowered down a cavern on a rope (swing into baddies and press Fire), the third has you in a spaceship flying through a scrolling tunnel (move up and down to avoid the rocks and press Fire), the fourth is a vertically scrolling version of the first and, from what I gather from the positively ancient NES original (on which this is based), it carries on in pretty much in the same vein from there on. Battletoads is divided into twelve levels.

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