Castle Crashers: The "Definitive" Review
By sweep 6 Comments
I spent a long time waiting for Castle Crashers. I loved Alien Hominid, and have mountains of respect for those guys over at the Behemoth. SO when I finally got my mitts on Castle Crashers last night I was pretty excited. 10 hours later.... I'm still pretty excited to be honest.
First thing I did after buying the game was shout my brother over - and we immediately hopped into the Adventure Mode. I picked the Red Knight, whilst my brother opted for the Orange Knight, providing us with a range of Electric and Fire attacks (Blue and Green possess Ice and Poison abilities). The story is presented - rescue the princesses from the evil castles. And so, the Castle Crashing began...
RPG
Although Castle Crashers has RPG elements to it's combat, never once did this feel restrictive. The difficulty of the game works at a gentle curve, so that we were never forced to retreat and grind up a few levels before we could advance through the story - an element of the gameplay design which I massively appreciated. This means you can watch your little dude grow more powerful and learn new attacks, without disrupting the flow of the game. The RPG elements are very simple - every time you smash an Evil dude you get some XP. Get enough, and you go up a level. With each new level you get awarded 2 attribute points, which can be divided amongst 4 abilities.- Strength
- Magic
- Defence
- Agility / ranged
The Combat
Very basic, as you would expect from a side-scroller. X is for quick attacks, Y for smashes. Combine them together in different orders to create combos. The longer your combo runs the more XP you will recieve. There is the usual bunch of animals and stuff to ride around on, with a refreshing mix of Behemoth humour. Watching an own shit itself and then fall out of a tree never gets old. The movement of your characters is very fluent so you can bounce around with ease without getting stuck behind objects - and the collision detection is also very forgiving meaning you dont have to be exactly parallel with your enemy to score a hit.Enemies can use all the same attacks as you, including magic and ranged attacks, as well as special moves like digging underground. There are dozens of different character models, and they all look fantastic so dont worry about getting bored fighting the same 4 dudes "only in different colours" for the entire game. When enemies are killed they will either drop gold or fruit.
If a player is killed then other players can go and revive them by pressing tapping Y in time to their heartbeat. Rappidly tapping Y will quickly ressurect the player, but if you are careful and time it right to the heartbeats you will ressurect your mate with more health. Health can otherwise be gained by picking up fruit or drinking potions (can be bought from shops).
Whilst playing I got a real sense of respect for Computer Games from the designers. It's clear they have obviously played around their own genre, and have looked at other similar titles and decided what they loved - and then stuck those ideas down in Castle Crashers. The resulting experiance lands at the top of the stack.
Right what else do I need to talk about? Oh yeah!
Animal Orbs and Weapons.
Weapons are fairly basic - they look way more awesome as you go up levels, and they will add and subtract points from your attributes - but they will not grant you new attacks. You use an axe the same as you use a pointy stick: you smack fools on the head with it until they stop moving.Animal Orbs are interesting mechanics that basically involve a little critter floating along behind you and helping you in one way or another. Some will give you a defence boost, others will attack or trip up enemies - my favorite is a little Giraffe who makes you level up faster... They dont need looking after or anything stupid like that they just look kind of cute. The enemy guys can use them as well so watch out....
Aethetics
I would at this point like to point out that the aesthetics of the game are phonemenal. The lines are all clear and crisp, the colours vibrant, and the "mature-cartoon" theme is continued brilliantly throughout the entire experiance; Menus, loading screens and all. I love the simple humour (very apparent in the boss characters) and it makes Castle Crashers such a charming experiance.The most important thing I feel is just the general atmosphere of the game. The sound is of a high quality and really adds to the sense of fun in the game. The screen is, most of the time, chaotic (the framerate thankfully perfect). There will be guys flying around everywhere, a war raging in the background, 3 or 4 guards or villagers helping you out, as well as 15 enemies running around shooting arrows and all casting spells and its just jaw-droppingly stunning. Castle Crashers excells at filling the screen with dudes for you to slash your way through, and it looks beautiful in the process. It was crazy with 2, I cannot wait to get over some more friends so we can slam through the game with 4 people...
Content
The storyline is predictably shallow, as to be expected from an arcade game. I played through and it took me about 5 hours from start to finish. That got me to level 25, but my stats were far from maxed out. One playthrough also got me about 5 achievements, but the others look like they could take a while longer for anyone who is interested.Minigames
There are two minigames - "All You can Quaff", and "Arena". Both can be played with 4 people online (hypothetically) and both have their own sets of leaderboards. All You can Quaff involves tapping X and Y alternately to eat your food as fast as possible. Arena is a caged fight between players, or if solo - a fight against waves of the local enemies depending on which arena you are visiting.Anything else? Ahh yes. Multiplayer.
Multiplayer
The lobby system is broken. Thats the beef, straight up. If i'm going to mention anything negative here today, its the lobby system.After completing the game on local co-op me and my brother tried to hop into a multiplayer adventure over the internet. Each time I clicked search I was presented a message that said "Game is currently full" or some other nonsense - I wasnt even at the lobby yet! I was at this point still quite enthuiastic so I spent a good 20 minutes retrying and getting stupid messages telling me all the games were full. This was extra frustrating as we were sent back out to the main menu after every failed attempt. A pain in the ass, to put it lightly. When I finally got into the lobby I selected a game and was promptly given the same error message as before and booted out to the main menu again.
*sigh*
Having persevered with the multiplayer I eventually got into a game with one other dude and the three of us (my brother was still hanging around) fought through a bunch of levels. It was pretty fun, but the other guy didnt have a mic which was a little frustrating. As he was the host we were restricted to only the levels he had unlocked, but I wasnt too bothered because they are all a lot of fun. I played online for about an hour and didnt notice any lag or drop in quality so thats a positive. But it really wasnt worth hanging around for half an hour to play. My guess is the servers are clogged up with eager gamers who have just got their hands on the game. Castle Crashers was highly anticipated and i'm sure lots of people jumped straight in, clogged up the servers, and were immediately dissapointed. But a similar thing happened with Super Smash Bro's and that got sorted out eventually so we will just have to wait and see... The Behemoth lads are fairly unexperianced with Online Multiplayer so I imagine their learning curve is rather steep...
Issues
The first time we played through the game my brother was using a guest account. Unfortunately this meant that his progress was not saved, and all his player stats were erased, including the character he had been leveling. He also couldnt use any of my characters that had been advanced which meant he had to start again from scratch. The only way around this was for him to sign into another account, and then his characters were saved - but he cannot take them online because that other account does not have XBLGold enabled. Its not a big problem its just a little frustrating for him because every time we go online he has to begin at level 1 again.Final Say
Castle Crashers is a lot of fun. But you have to take it at surface value. If you come expecting a great deal of depth to any one aspect to the game you are going to be dissapointed. If you just want to go and brawl it out with your friends in a genuinely exciting and amusing adventure, then this is the game for the job. Its a lot of fun, it keeps you busy at all times, and it seldom gets boring or repetitive. The layout is clean and easy to use - and for the most part the game is simple enough to master without any real tuition, so pretty much anyone can pick-up and play. It deserves this MAMMOTH review. I loved it, and if you give it a chance i'm certain you will see why...
Thanks for reading
Love Sweep