Does Battletoads Have Online Multiplayer?

Rare and Dlala have decided to defy all sense of reason and make a new Battletoads game. Fortunately, it turned out to be pretty good! From the ashes of some of the worst beat ‘em ups ever (with dope music, though) comes a game with great animation, music, humor, and deeper combat mechanics than anyone expected. But like any other brawler it’s best with friends, and what with the state of the world right now it’s not easy to get people together. So can you hook up with your pals online and crack some skulls together?

Does Battletoads Support Online Co-op?

Unfortunately the answer is no. Battletoads was pitched by Dlala as a couch co-op experience, meaning from what anyone can tell there’s no framework for online play in the game at this time. We also haven’t seen any reason to believe online play is being added anytime soon. While it’s rare these days to see a multiplayer game ship as a local-only experience, sometimes the people who make that decision do so for deliberate reasons. And it seems like that’s the case here.

Related: Toadally Rad Battletoads Combat Guide

That said, there are solutions. If you’re playing Battletoads on PC, you can use remote streaming services, like Parsec for example, to get some friends together in spite of that limitation. That isn’t a perfect solution for so many reasons, but it’s definitely on the table. If your or your friends’ connections can’t handle that much bandwidth though, you’re out of luck. If you have roommates, significant others, family, or people you don’t need to socially distance from, that’s going to be your best bet to play Battletoads multiplayer seamlessly. And you’ll need to do that eventually if you want to get all the achievements.

That said, Battletoads does compensate somewhat for players who aren’t able to get a co-op game running. In the single-player mode, you can tag the other toads in, and they all have their own health bars. This helps your survivability a ton, as the game will even swap a toad out if they lose all their health, and recover some while they’re on the bench. You can also tag toads in and out mid-combo, giving you a lot of space for creative and high-scoring combo strings.

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Are you enjoying Battletoads on your Xbox One or PC, but still bummed out that you can’t play it with your friends online? Are you hoping that feature could come in a future update somewhere down the line? Or are you okay with having your friends over for some couch co-op? Let us know how you’re feeling about the Battletoads over on the Prima Games Facebook and Twitter channels!