for not giving the player a clear perspective of what is going on sometimes, and Michael Koczy of the German edition of Total! wrote the game had "poor animation," "average" music, and toads that were hard to distinguish between each other. Mr. Goo of GameFan critiqued the small sprite size. A GameFan reviewer was critical of the inclusion of Double Dragon characters, reasoning that the franchise was past its prime. VideoGames & Computer Entertainment journalist Chris Bieniek opined the NES version's graphics was exceptional as expected for a late-era game, but received little improvement in the Genesis version. Retrospective The visuals were praised, particularly the humorous attack animations, and vibrant colors. Matt Hull of Hardcore Gaming 101, reviewing the NES version, praised the humor of the moves and sound effects, "superb" music, "very smooth" controls, and for having the same 16-bit-looking graphics as the prior Battletoads game, particularly the animation, backgrounds, parallax scrolling, and the Colossus. He said, "You'll see parts of the spaceship moving and it just looks so fluid/smooth that I can't believe that it's 8 bit!" The Video Game Critic called the stages "fully interactive and full of surprises". Hull appreciated its more forgiving difficulty in comparison to the originalBattletoads, Thornburg stated it was still unfair at times, noting "unbalanced fights", "moving down a rope too fast for the screen and being killed by seemingly nothing or being overcrowded by enemies at the most frustrated moments". The combination of the Battletoads and Double Dragon properties were well-received, with Skyler Miller of AllGame opining that "Rare does a fine job at connecting the two universes without making it seem forced or arbitrary." However, some reviewers found problems in presenting the Double Dragon property, such as Double Dragon IIs Burnov being the Shadow Boss instead of Jimmy and Roper being misnamed. An AllGame critic, Brett Alan Weiss, was harsh on the SNES version, calling it "an unnecessary creation, except to line the pockets of the companies involved", and too similar in looks and gameplay to its 8-bit counterpart, thus not taking enough advantage of the 16-bit console's capabilities. His other criticisms were the "slow" controls, "jerky" character movements, and poor audio, writing that "the sound effects are boring and the music is of the pseudo rock 'n' roll variety, replete with drum machine-sounding drums and thoroughly unconvincing guitar riffs." The game was featured on the lists of "top 11