A game victimized by incredibly stupid design decisions
Every once in a while, I play a game where I am astonished at the unbelievable, mind-boggling, incredibly incredibly incredibly stupid design decisions that went into making it. Castle Crashers is one of those games. I can't believe that this game made it out the door without testers screaming about it. Maybe they just decided that that whole "testing thing" wasn't worthwhile.
Here's the biggest problem with this turd -- the game has the most retarded checkpoint save system ever conceived. It doesn't just have checkpoints, but it also re-locks places that you have already unlocked if you exit the game. The game gives you absolutely no indication that it is going to do this. It just does it. So, you can play for an hour, unlock a few areas, quit your game, and find out at the beginning of the next session that you have to unlock all of those parts all over again. Each level is pretty long, and has no checkpoints, health potions, or shops. Playing through the same boring level and hamering the square and triangle button over and over again for an hour is not fun. If you slog through a tough level and get killed by the boss at the end, you have to play the entire thing all over again. If you quit the game, you might turn it on the next day to find out that not only do you have to play that level, but the previous two levels as well.
Not only do the levels not save your progress, but the game does save whether or not you use your items. That means that if you consume your potions in an unsuccessful attempt on a level, you have to start that level again with zero potions. This is another feature of the game that makes me think that it was developed in some kind of institution for the MRDD, where everyone wears a diaper and drools on themselves. I did not think that it was physically possible that there was a human being on the Earth stupid enough to think that this would be fun. I was wrong. There are more than a few of them, and they work for the developer of this game.
The gameplay itself is kind of meh. Castle Crashers is an extremely repetitive button masher that is clearly designed for more than two players. It's possible to play it with one or two, but that's not what it was made for. For instance, you can revive knocked down players, but it takes about five seconds, an eternity during which you are exposed to enemies. Only if you have three or more players can you put this to use during combat. The game also has some shallow arena fighting, which doesn't hold much value either, because characters that are more than a few levels apart are totally mismatched, and it's not like a fighting game where each character is unique.
Maybe one day I'll finish this piece of shit. I quit after the third or fourth time that I got screwed out of a bunch of progress because the game keeps its save system secret from you. After doing some googling, I found out that this is not a bug or an accident -- this is actually a feature. That was the point where I figured out that this one wasn't for me.
