Castle Crashers Reviews

Castle Crashers is a side-scrolling beat em’ up that combines intense multiplayer action with a unique sense of humor and excellent artistic design.

Story:
As the story begins, an evil wizard invades your peaceful kingdom, steals the King’s magic crystal, kidnaps the four princesses, and unleashes hordes of barbarians upon the people. It’s up to you (and your faithful knight friends) to defeat the evil wizard and free the damsels in distress.

Yes, Castle Crashers has an entirely predictable story, but it’s one we all love. Thankfully the story in no way, shape, or form diminishes from the overall fun of the game.

Gameplay:
Those who recall the classic arcade game Golden Axe will feel instantly at home with Castle Crashers. You have a light and a heavy attack, a basic magic attack, and you can block and jump. As you progress through the game, you can learn additional magic attacks, as well as the ability to use more complex combos consisting of mixed light and heavy melee attacks. Although the controls are simple, mastering them will take practice. In addition, as you progress through the game, you will have the option to equip different weapons, use several items, and attach a number of familiars to your character.

The enemies you encounter along the way are varied and cleverly designed. The bosses, in particular, come in all shapes and sizes and will not only test your skill but ensure you have a riotously good time to boot. The difficulty is well balanced so that the game is constantly challenging but never feels impossible.

Castle Crashers is meant to be enjoyed in 4 player co-op. When the game was first released, there was quite a fiasco with the online multiplayer not working properly. This has since been fixed, allowing for online play, but Castle Crashers really shines when played 4-player locally with friends. After an epic 15 minute battle with some of the bosses, you and your buddies will feel like you just went to war together.

In addition, the game features a couple other modes, but the jewel here is in the co-op story mode.

Graphics/Sound/Music:
This is the category that really separates Castle Crashers from the pack. The graphic design of the levels, characters, and enemies is all superb, coming at you with a unique visual style that you will either love or hate (but most likely love).

The sound effects and music are equally impressive. The intense action is superbly complemented by the sound, and the music is fitted perfectly to the mood of the particular scene. Many of the boss fights, in particular, are enhanced by a great musical score.

Value:
At $15, Castle Crashers is one of the more expensive XBLA games, especially for a game that probably takes no more than a few hours to beat, but it is absolutely worth it. The intense action is something that you won’t easily find anywhere else, and with collectibles to be found, a number of characters to unlock, and with an insane mode to boot, you should find plenty of reasons to come back to the game in the future.

Achievements:
The achievements for Castle Crashers are mostly fun and varied. You get some for playing the game in different ways, some for collecting items, some for accomplishing unique tasks, and some for playing different online multiplayer modes. Overall they give the gamer a taste of just about everything the game has to offer.

Final Thoughts:
Castle Crashers is what it is, a wacky and intense beat em’ up that lasts just long enough to satisfy your appetite but not long enough to get you bored. In terms of gameplay, Castle Crashers doesn’t bring a ton of innovation into the genre, but everything that Castle Crashers does, it does very well.

Castle Crashers reviewed by Chris Henderson.

I downloaded castle crashers earlier this year, as I was looking for a game that I could just pick up and play when I got too infuriated with what ever game I was playing at the time. Well I can say in my opinion I made a good decision.

Castle Crashers is a side scrolling Slash em up, which reminds me of Golden Axe, but with more gore. It is simple story, bad guy steals magic crystal, and then his minions abduct four princesses for good measure. You set out as one of four Knights Green, Red, Blue and orange (Power Rangers anyone??) to rescue them and retrieve the crystal. Each Knight has a lethal arsenal at their disposal, elemental magic is one when at higher levels is really handy. You also have choices of melee weapons (some of which vary from a lollipop to some major butt kicking swords) and bows + arrows (in my opinion pretty useless).

You also have pet orbs at you beck and call, each one gives the knight a different advantage, Monkey gives you extra experience, the owl finds food to restore your health and a psycho looking bear which just tries to kill anything. The game has a tinge of RPG to it, as your knights level up you can increase there base skills, which improve there attack, magic, speed and bowman ship.

Each level is brightly coloured and easy to manoeuvre round; the game play is smooth and easy to grasp, with it being a side scrolling game you always know which way to head. The story although pretty linear is easy to get into and to want to finish. The enemies are not going to try and ambush you and attack while your not watching, but they do come en-masse, you get a good variance of enemies with different skills and techniques, so you have to learn the best way to handle them. Boss battles vary from really easy to stupidly hard. But overall a joy to play and it has replay-ability as there are two DLC which add new characters, weapons and pet orbs.

The game also boasts two mini games, the first is an arena, where you can go all out and slaughter friends at will. The other is all you can quaff, which is a button tapping eating game. Its fun to play with friends when you have got tired of slaughtering.

Castle crashers can be played in single player or co-op locally, but it can also be played through X-BOX Live with three other players. This leads to hours of fun and for a simple game it excels in that area. You can literally pick it up and enjoy it. I would recommend this game to people who enjoy multiplayer games.

To me there is no wonder it was voted XBLA game of the year 2008.

Thanks for reading

Chris Henderson

Castle Crashers Review
Nothing says cooperation like slicing and dicing hordes of odd enemies.

Personally i think that this is the best arcade game to be released on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace.

Easy controls; tons of unlockable items; fun for all gamer levels; great value for the price.

Cons: Humor is a bit too juvenile at times; online play is unstable; extensive play could easily result in sore hands.

Suggested for: Couples, teenagers, people obsessed with collecting things Games that are designed to be played with more than one person are growing in popularity, but the majority of these games still find players competing against one another rather than playing the game together as a team. Luckily, Castle Crashers puts a laser-sharp focus on cooperative gameplay, offering an experience that can be enjoyed by couples and groups of friends, whether you’re sitting on the same couch or across the country from each other.

With a cartoony art style and some really creative enemy designs, Castle Crashers delivers a silly, light-hearted gaming experience that can be played no matter what your gaming ability. The game pits you and your friends as knights tasked with tracking down an evil wizard and rescuing your kingdom’s princesses; to do this, you much battle your way through horde after horde of enemies, ranging from other knights and barbarians to skeletons and evil, cultish-looking teddy bears.

The gameplay at its core is super simple. You move with the analog stick and press either X or Y to attack with your weapon. That’s really all you need to know to play the game. But players looking for a more sophisticated experience can easily add to their strategy by using items, magical attacks and unlockable attack combinations. Each character also has the ability to have an animal follow them into battle, which can do everything from helping to attack enemies to increasing your health or the amount of experience you gain during battles. And while you can play through the regular story mode alone, it’s much easier and much more fun to have the help of at least one other person.

Besides the main story mode, the game has two small competitive modes that can be played locally or against others on Xbox Live, but the real depth of creativity and fun gameplay comes from the main mode.

One drawback is that the humor, while often just silly, can get too juvenile in certain places and will likely have you rolling your eyes. There are also some problems if you try to play over Xbox Live. You may find it hard to find a competitive match and your connection may drop unexpectedly during cooperative play. However, the developer is aware of this issue and promises an update to the game as soon as possible. The only other problem is that the constant tapping of the buttons may make your hands a little sore if you play for an extended period of time -- but then, that’s true with a lot of games.

Nevertheless, Castle Crashers is a really great game, and on top of all its other great qualities, even though its 1200 MSP. It’s really tough to go wrong with this one.

Publisher The Behemoth
Developer The Behemoth

The "too long, didn't read" version of the review:

You can see a deer shitting itself.

11/10. Game of the year. Last year, this year, and next year. And all following years.



The "full" version of the review:

It's fun. You can play with friends. If you have absent friends you can play with yourself while waiting for friends to appear, or even play by yourself if you're the kind of person that lives in a house which has bean bags instead of real furniture.

You play as a guy that has a weapon and some clothes. There are other guys as well if the first guy isn't to your liking. You can even play as a retarded version of ET if you have a save file from a previous game by The Behemoth (called "Retarded ET").
PRO-TIP: The alien is yellow.

You fight people and the game ends when you either kill everyone, or get bored.

There are some other online modes which are fucking dull and not worth playing after getting the achievements, although there is a special chance to make randoms really angry by going in to ranked "all you can eat" matches and using a turbo controller.

Oh, and there is a deer that shits itself.

In summary; 11/10. Game of the year. Last year, this year, and next year. And all following years.