Consolation Prize

I’ve not had much of a chance to catch up on my backlog of games this week; I did however manage to dedicate some time to the glorious Castle Crashers developed by The Behemoth. Whereas I couldn’t quite get along with Alien Hominid HD, this title is an altogether different prospect and immediately appeals to my sadistic “beat-the-crap-out-of-everything-that-moves” nature.

To succinctly sum up the game, Castle Crashers is a side scrolling beat-em-up for up-to four players (locally or over Xbox Live) and instantly reminded me of one of my old arcade favourites Golden Axe.

Initially playing as one of four knights (Green, Orange, Blue, Red) the game starts as you’re partying hard in the castle hall only to be rudely interrupted when a fatally wounded guard is thrown through the door disrupting the party. Investigating the commotion you discover that the castle has been raided, the king threatened, some sort of magical gem stolen, and four princesses carried off by the contemptible invaders. So it’s up-to you to rescue the fair maidens and put those miscreants to the sword!

Castle Crashers is fast and manic as multiple opponents congregate on your character from all quarters giving you little time for respite. During the time I played however the combat never felt too overbearing and it always felt like I had a good chance of survival as long as I remained fleet-of-foot and didn’t allow myself to become cornered. Combos can be easily chained together, even if you resort to button mashing, and new moves are awarded as characters level up. My personal key to success with this game is due to aerial combos, which if performed correctly allow you to juggle enemies, alternating between light and heavy attacks, across the screen whilst keeping out of harms way.

The controls are relatively straightforward using just a few buttons leaving you free to concentrate on the mayhem, but to summarise: “X” delivers a light strike, “Y” a heavy blow, “A” jumps, and holding down the right trigger and pressing “Y” will deliver a magical attack (of which each character has a different elemental variant). In addition items can be scrolled through using the “bumper” buttons and activated by using “B”. If you really need to you can also block attacks with your shield when holding down the left trigger.

Visually the game uses a fantastic highly stylised cartoon look, and both the character and art design seems to be of a very high standard. The two boss encounters you can experience as part of the trial are both great and feature the huge monstrosities we’ve all come to expect from end-of-level battles. One major concern I have with Castle Crashers however is in direct relation to the bosses themselves, which can easily obscure your view of the action frustratingly leaving you at the mercy of the game.

The single-player game is great fun to play but the meat and potatoes of this game will undoubtedly be playing together with a bunch of friends and having a whale of a time. Unfortunately the trial game doesn’t allow you to try out the online elements, and from what I’ve read it’s suffering from some issues, so I’ll have to reserve my judgement on this aspect.

Castle Crashers is available from Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 Microsoft Points (GBP 10.20 / EUR 9.30 / USD 14.99) and is well worth a look.

I tried the demo and liked it a lot. I did not buy it yet, but I plan to.

I would really like to pick this up. The hand drawn graphics look absolutely marvelous. It’s also become harder and harder to find co-operate games nowadays that aren’t FPS. Unfortunately it’s not on PSN, I sure do hope it gets ported over.

It’s definitely harder to find co-op games these days that doesn’t involve some sort of automatic weapon, especially ones you can enjoy with four friends all in the same room.

Castle Crashers is another breath of fresh air in what has been a great summer of Xbox Live Arcade titles and I’ve found that I am playing this and “Braid” more than boxed retail games at present.

I’m not sure what the exclusivity rights are with regards to this game - I thought it was just exclusive to Xbox Live - but “exclusive” games these days have a habit of appearing on multiple consoles after a time delay.

[...] played through the sublime Castle Crashers a couple of times now, and in addition to my initial impressions, I thought I’d give you five reasons why this rapidly became one of my favourite games of the [...]