Castle Crashers Review

For those who have been crying about the absence of new brawlers, Castle Crashers has arrived to save you from your lamentations. The game is a hilarious adventure through medieval countrysides, enemy-filled castles, and venting volcanoes in search of true love[s], as well as the end of evil. It has some online issues, but storming a castle has never been more fun.

You and your band of knights must rescue the princesses from the evil horde.

The CC campaign drops you in the role of a powerful, magic-wielding knight who must cross diverse terrain with his menagerie of pets in tow. Your quest is to hunt down an evil sorcerer who rode away on the castle's magic crystal, kidnapped four princesses, and left your kingdom in ruin. You start out with a basic weapon, a mild arcane power, and an unyielding devotion to king and country. As you cut through enemies, you will gain experience, level up, find new weapons, and learn new attack combinations that will make you a more perfect instrument of vengeance. You can deliver very satisfying melee attacks using the X button or deal slower attacks with extra damage using the Y button. By mixing and matching those two attacks, or adding in jumps, you can crank out satisfying combos to juggle enemies, stomp on downed opponents, or wail on groups of henchmen as you carve your way to an area's boss.

Bosses are not only grand in scale but also a fun challenge. There is a pattern to their attacks, and it requires strategy in addition to a flurry of attacks to bring them down. Early bosses are endurance tests in dodging and attacking, and later bosses ramp up the humor, as well as the challenge. Fights range from brawling on the back of a speeding carriage to neutralizing a lightsaber-wielding organist whose pipes spew cannonballs. In addition to the main foes, many encounters include a number of lackeys who will attack you while you are either trying to focus on the boss or otherwise stay alive. This extra fodder is frequently necessary to keep you supplied with health pickups (to stay alive), power-ups (to alter your character state to effectively deal damage), or gold (that you can use to later buy truckloads of goodies).

The locations are diverse, and the tide of combat is always high.

Alien Hominid, developer The Behemoth's previous game, was known for its punishing level of difficulty. Castle Crashers has benefited from better campaign balancing and strikes just the right mixture of challenge and enjoyment. Puzzles aren't too hard, and diverse enemies become progressively tougher as you progress in the story. Death in a level doesn't end your game or force you to tap into a finite number of continues. Failure to complete a level only kicks you back out to an overworld map. From there, you can choose to replay the section you just failed or select a previous level to look for weapons, call in friends, or get more experience to level up.

The role-playing elements of the game are simple: You get one talent point every time you level up. You can allocate those points to raise your strength to do more damage, increase your speed and improve bow-firing expertise, or enhance your magic to not only do more damage, but also replenish your gauge faster. Allocating points in between strings of levels allows you to customize your character so that he becomes the fighting machine you prefer.