I wish I had people to crash castles with
Castle Crashers is the brightly animated 2D beat 'em up by game developers; The Behemoth and runs for 1200 Microsoft points. The Behemoth was well known for it's first game Alien Hominid HD on the Xbox Live Arcade. It does a good job bringing humor and platforming to a standard beat 'em up style that you would think wouldn't be popular in today's consumer mindset. Though this game does suffer from a few bugs that can harm it quite a bit.
The game has you chase after evil bosses that stole four princess's from the castle. Your quest involves you going through many areas such as the standard locations that would basically represent the 'fire area,' 'ice area,' 'forest area' and so on. Each area has new enemies in which you will need to kill and make it to the boss so save one princess after the other.
Castle Crashers is much like the game TMNT 1989 classic, in the way of it's beat 'em up style of gameplay. So if you liked that game, it's pretty safe to say now that you will enjoy this one. A beat 'em involves usually a high multiplayer value in which you move through levels just button mashing to kill enemies who are walking around and causing havoc. It also relies quite a bit on an RPG element since each enemy you kill awards your experience points or EXP points that helps you level up. You also get more points to use towards stat upgrades like magic and agility.
The biggest thing this style of game has going for it would be that it's a big social game, meaning it should have great multiplayer. Castle Crashers does that; but only for local co op. When the game was launched it's online became apparent that it's pretty crippled. Many people find that they can't get into games or even go online and find other people to play with. Trying to invite a friend in was impossible for me to be able to do and the one time I managed to find someone to play with, the game disconnected the instant we choose our characters. Though some people do seem to not have to much trouble, they only seem to be able to play for a few hours before something goes wrong. This fact really harms Castle Crashers because even with playing the single player alone, you can tell that it would be that much more fun for each friend you have with you.
With that being said, the game still stands quite strong on it's own as a single player game. Each new area involves something new that you need to take into account. Whether this be new styles in which the enemies fight, or new gameplay elements. In some areas you'll find yourself pitted against hooded thieves as they jabbed me with knives and shot me with arrows, while others will have you balancing on fish while you slash at a giant water cat thing. With other side missions to do like trying to find all the animal orbs or unlocking all the weapons in the game. The game even has arenas set throughout the game's map page so you can just get into a random brawl while trying to unlock new characters. Along with some humorous scenes and funny jokes this goes together quite nicely.
Though the game seems to try and go off three main modes, the adventure, an arena and a mini games where you mash the X and Y buttons called All You Can Quaff. Besides the adventure, these seems to try to make these a big deal, making the mini game even available in online and for leader boards. Though this game lasts maybe less than thirty seconds and that's about it, it doesn't interact in the main game at all and comes off as something the creators just stuffed in there for no reason. The arena option also seems like something just randomly thrown in, but has a little more significance. This would be for someone who just wants to play a quick game and kill a bunch of guys. Though it ends quite quickly and doesn't provide anything for a the win so it seems like turning your 360 on and loading up the game would take longer than this mode some times. There's also no way to change the arena mode you have since it's set to the first arena you unlock during the story. So your getting the same thing you have inside the main adventure mode. Some inter-connectivity would have been nice between the three modes with something even as small as getting some EXP points.
The graphics in the game are quite nice as everything seems quite smooth. It follows the same design as Alien Hominid did with it's flashtoon like look. Even at times it feels like this game would be fine as a flash game. The colors though are so vibrant and bold that they look nice on the usually dreary background. With all the different looking weapons, spells and items you can use, you can see a lot was put into this game. Let alone the many different landscapes you'll come across. The games tries to reach many different locations and succeed in replicating them beautifully.
As stated before, there are some bugs in it and one of the main ones I found where in the frame rate. While playing through a level that involved me riding a deer through an abandoned mill while other deer fled along side me. To my surprise I noticed one of the other deer wasn't actually moving in a set motion, more just stuck in one position but moving along side us as if it was flying. The next bug I saw was when fighting a boss, I hit him but for some reason he remained in the air being hurt by some unknown force. I knew this was probably just a random glitch since I played it again and this didn't happen. Among those were some freezing issues that occurred a few times and with all these together, it brings the game down a little. One of the biggest known bugs was that people's data was being erased for no apparent reason, I for one didn't run into this problem but it didn't seem to be only a few cases.
The general value you will get from this game is that it would have been worth the 1200 points you threw down. Being that this was one of the few XBLA games to be priced over the average 800, you would expect that you should be getting your monies worth for it. Castle Crashers would reach that expectation if it weren't for the broken online play it contains. While yes single player is fun and will have you enjoying it and laughing often, you always feel that this would be better if you had some buddies or random strangers to tackle those castles with. So overall I can recommend it, but at the same time I'm very close to not being able to what with all the bugs. I did enjoy the game and haven't run into memory loss problems, but I'm always disappointed that the online didn't hold up.
Overall: 8/10
