Toxic Crusaders (1992) NES Review

Toxic Crusaders (1992)
Developed by: TOSE
Published by: Bandai
Released in: NA

A game based on a short lived kid’s cartoon based on a cult classic R-rated horror film. This isn’t the first time such a bizarre phenom has been covered on this blog, and it won’t be the last, either. The trend of watering down of adult franchises for the consumption of snot nosed kids ran rampant in the wild era of the 80s and early 90s, though none of them were particularly successful. Someone must’ve just been having a giggle.

Toxic Crusaders is allegedly a beat ’em up starring Tromaville’s own Toxie, a toxeriffic dude who loves the environment, because you weren’t legally allowed to be a cartoon character in the 1990’s if you didn’t. I’ve never seen the cartoon, but I’m willing to bet this squeaky clean characterization doesn’t carry over from the R-rated flicks.

As Toxie, you’re equipped with nothing but your trusty mop and your fists to save your girlfriend. If you get hit even once, you lose your mop and are left to fend for yourself with your sludgy bare hands. If the stars align just right and you happen to be blessed enough to upgrade your mop along the way, a hit will revert your weapon back a step, rendering it useless again.

Aesthetically, it’s nothing special. The first two levels open with strong, pleasing colour palettes, but only get worse as the game goes on. This is an NES title that features some good parallax scrolling though, so that’s something nice I can say about it. The music falls under the same camp of middling mediocrity as the graphics, with some songs ranging from the acceptable to the downright tedious. Your hit points feel as though they drain quicker than the cartoon’s cancellation, and you’re given three lives and a simple password system, which essentially acts as infinite continues. This alleviates the game’s difficulty by a lot, but it also means you have no real reason to give up on trying to trudge through this sludge pile of a game. Unless you have common sense, which seems to be something I lack.

Everything about Toxic Crusaders is perfectly serviceable. Despite that, I hope you can feel the scowl on my face through my words. So what, pray tell, left me feeling so bitter? The game’s biggest sin is being boring as shit. It’s mind numbingly repetitive, even for a game of this kind – there are no combos, kicks, crouch attacks or alternate attacks of any kind besides “mop” and “punch”. There are only two types of enemies in the game up until the last stage, and those two enemies are actually just the same generic grunts as each other, but with different weapons. Trudging through the dull as dishwater levels is an extreme test of patience, even though they’re technically not that long. Every time I stumbled my way through another wave of the same enemies I had killed a thousand times, I hoped with all of my cold little heart that the next would be the last. The levels all feel the same, and do little to mix up the formula (bar for a sub-level where you have to slog through an underwater section that was about as fun as doing long division). There’s also a a level that has you careening down a highway on a skateboard, and it SOMEHOW manages to feel the exact same as the previous ones. Just remembering it is enough to make me want to yell.

Angry reviewing is far from my style, but I feel like there are few good things to say about Toxic Crusaders. I can’t see it making anyone’s top 10 NES games list – hell, not even a top 100. I know logically that it isn’t the worst game the NES has to offer by a long shot, but I hated every second of its bland ass. Most everything about it is disgustingly average, and playing it past a certain point made my skin crawl with the itch of desperation to break out of tedium. There wasn’t a single thing I found satisfying about the experience; not even finishing the thing! You’d be better off playing with a vat of toxic ooze than playing this waste of time.

Initial Interest Rating: 6/10
Final Rating: