(A Castle Crashers Review)

A few weeks ago I went to the store and traded in a couple games in order to get Mercenaries 2 at a cheaper price from my local EBX.  While I was out, I decided to leave my Xbox 360 on downloading some of the demos of games that I missed because of the whole red ring of death and 10 weeks without an Xbox thing.  Among these demos was the Castle Crashers Demo.  

Castle Crashers is the latest creation from the team at Newgrounds.  They also made the game Alien Hominid many years ago.  Yes that impossible game where you die from getting hit once and have to memorize the attack patterns of the boss characters and blast away at them for what seemed to be an eternity…  It sucked real bad, but developed a god following since it had pretty graphics and some pretty goo humor.

Where was I?  Oh yes Castle Crashers. In short, I bought it immediately after I had completed the demo.  The long version?  Read on…

The game is beautiful.  The little SD characters and animated backgrounds are very shiny and they look outstanding in HD due to the fully scalable vector design of the presumably flash-based graphics.  The music is truly epic in every sense, I would assume to pull you into the game or to add to the over the top mood of the gameplay.  All the tracks can be found on the Newgrounds website, if you wanted to listen to them on your iPod etc, but just be extra careful that you don’t find yourself hacking people’s heads off and smooching all of the princesses you see.  I’m telling you right now, there is blood, and body parts flying, in a light cartoony way, but you still may not want your children playing it because of this.  

As for gameplay, it’s very hack and slash.  It’s a side scrolling beat em’ up, sort of like Golden Axe and Streets of Rage, but with a leveling and experience points system.  You quest around on a map reminiscent of Super Mario World fighting hordes of bad guys who change with the area of the map you are in.  As you upgrade your 4 basic skill areas with experience points each time your character levels, you of course get much stronger.  If you can’t beat a level on your own, you then have two options:  you can go back and try to level up some more first since all levels you have already completed are open and available should you decide to go back, (and its a good idea to do so anyway, which I will explain in a moment) or you could get some friends to help you on Xbox live.  The games online multiplayer is a blast. There are small differences that occur to make the game more interesting like portions where you have to duke it out with your friends to see who gets to kiss the princess, or having to give your friends CPR when they die in order to bring them back to life.

The game is loaded with goodies and content and hidden items.  There are many weapons in the game to choose from including anything from golden swords to lobsters, some of which are dug up after you get the shovel item, some are found randomly, and some are dropped by specific enemies.  The chance of them dropping from enemies seems to be very low, so I wouldn’t count on getting every weapon you want in this manner.  There are small hidden areas all over which can be accessed with bombs and other special items.  Some thing can only be found with the help of the animal orbs.  Animal orbs are little creatures that are found in the same way as weapons and other special items.  They follow you around and do anything from boost your strength, magic, defense, or agility to fighting enemies at your side or securing loot for you.  My favorite is the giraffe who increases the amount of experience points you procure.  Just a note, if your friends play with you the only way to have the same animal orb as your friends would be the join the game with it already equipped or look for it in the location that it is normally found in the game.  The game only makes one of each available at the animal ark in multiplayer.  I suppose because 4 rammys would just be too devastating.  

 As far as playability and re-playability, the game is so much fun the first time through that you will definitely want to try it again.  The games seems long the first time, but shorter each time as you get used to the levels and learn tricks to defeat the various enemies.  If you are worried about what you can do when your characters reach high levels, there is an “insane mode” available to any character that has beaten the game once already.  You unlock characters with each new character you beat the game with, so there is plenty of incentive to play through the game multiple times,however it is a bit disappointing that you don’t get a reward for beating the game in insane mode.  

All in all, I am very impressed with this game and the types of titles that have been released lately on the Xbox live arcade in general.  This game has probably stolen somewhere along the line of 15-20 hours of my time in the last 2 weeks.  I didn’t know I had hat much time to play video games, much less to play an Xbox live arcade game.  In that time I have unlocked 5 characters and unlocked every animal orb, and nearly every weapon.  Just keep in mind that there is some weird glitch whereby you lose everything except character unlocks.  I don’t know why but when Jungletrek and I were playing the other day, he lost every unlockable except characters upon our beating the game.  Keep in mind that he and I have a knack for finding bugs and tricks.  Other than that I’d have to say the game is flawless.  I’d say it gets at least an 8/10 if not better.  Go out and download it right now, you can go wrong with this one.