Toxic Crusaders gives the Toxic Avenger’s one-season cartoon the sequel it never got

For a short spell in the early nineties, Troma’s most notorious creation led a second life on children’s television. The Toxic Avenger, a cult hero born in gleefully gory low-budget cinema, was scrubbed down into Toxie, the mop-wielding leader of a band of mutant misfits fighting pollution in a cartoon called Toxic Crusaders. The show lasted a single season, and Tromaville went quiet. Toxic Crusaders, the game, rests on one idea: that the story can be picked up where it stopped, in the form that suited it all along, the side-scrolling arcade brawler.

The new gameplay trailer, which Retroware debuted during The MIX Fall Online Showcase, reads as a statement of that lineage. The Philadelphia studio, which describes its whole business as “modern retro games” and also runs its own arcades, frames the footage as coin-op action lifted from the most beloved brawlers of the nineties: hard-hitting combos, stages not shown before and boss battles pitched deliberately over the top. Toxie, Nozone, Major Disaster and the rest of the gang punch, kick and mop Dr. Killemoff’s Radiation Rangers off the streets of Tromaville.

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The roster is where the design makes its argument. Seven Crusaders are playable, Toxie, Nozone, Junkyard, Major Disaster, Headbanger, Yvonne and Mrs. Junko, each with abilities of their own, and up to four players can share the screen in local co-op. That is the old social contract of the arcade cabinet, and it is also the cartoon’s: a team show whose jokes land because the misfits fight side by side. Store screenshots show the pixel-art stages, from a suburban street to a diner and a junkyard, broken up by comic-panel cutscenes that lean on the animated series rather than on the bloodier films.

That choice of source matters. In the announcement, Retroware says the game tells an all-new story written to continue the narrative of the 1991 series, with Dr. Killemoff and the forces of the polluted planet Smogula once again laying siege to Tromaville. The project is made with Troma Entertainment, the independent studio behind the original films, which gives the continuation a claim to canon that a fan tribute would not have.

Toxic Crusaders is coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam, where it can already be wishlisted and where a playable demo is available now. Retroware still gives no release date, only “soon”. Patience has been part of the deal: when the game was revealed in March 2023, it was pitched for release that same year, and a later fall 2024 window also came and went.

Until it lands, the trailer does what Saturday-morning cartoons always did best, keeping Tromaville on screen long enough to make the wait for the next episode feel like part of the show.

Tags: game trailers, The MIX, beat ’em up games, The Toxic Avenger, Retroware, Toxic Crusaders

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