Games / Game Reviews

Review: Castle Crashers

By Sean Booker
October 16, 2008 - 14:00

Castle Crashers is the brightly animated 2D beat 'em up by game developers The Behemoth, creators of popular game Alien Hominid HD, and runs for 1200 Microsoft Points.  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.

Castle Crashers has you chase after evil bosses who have stolen four princesses from the castle. Your quest involves you travelling through many standard locations that would basically represent the "fire area," "ice area," "forest area" and so on. Each area has new enemies, which you will need to defeat to make it to the boss and save one princess after the other.

Boss Fight!

Castle Crashers is much like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Classic Arcade Game , in its beat 'em up style of gameplay. So if you liked that game, it's pretty safe to say that you will enjoy this one. An action/beat 'em up video game usually involves a substantial multiplayer element, since you are simply moving through levels just button mashing to kill enemies who are walking around and causing havoc. They generally also rely quite a bit on an RPG element, since each enemy you kill awards your experience points (also known as XP) that help you level up. The points you collect can be used to upgrade your character's stats, like magic and agility.

As noted above, 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 – "should" being the keyword here. Castle Crashers does that, but only for local co-op. When the game launched its online component, it became apparent that that area is pretty crippled. Many people find that they can't get into games, find other players online, or even find that they can't connect online altogether. Trying to invite a friend to join a game was impossible for me, 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 have less trouble, they only seem to be able to play for a few hours before something goes wrong. This issue really harms Castle Crashers because even with playing the single player alone, you can tell that the fun would increase with each extra friend you had playing with you.


With that 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 it's new styles with which the enemies fight, or new gameplay elements. In some areas you'll find yourself pitted against hooded thieves that jab you with knives and shoot you with arrows, while others will have you balancing on fish while you slash at a giant water cat thing. There are also 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 map page so you can get into a random brawl while trying to unlock new characters. Along with some humorous scenes and funny jokes, this goes together quite nicely.

The game does more to get you playing apart from the main adventure mode, with two other playable modes for both offline and online versus. One of the modes is based on the arena from the main campaign and the other is a button mashing mini game called All You Can Quaff. We can see that the developers tried to make these worthwhile components to the game by the addition of leaderboards and even achievements for these modes specifically, but overall they just end up being useless add-ons. The biggest faults about these two modes is that they don't interact with the main game in any beneficial ways. All You Can Quaff doesn't have anything at all to do with the game and is really there for, maybe, a quick laugh or two. And that's it. The arena option 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. It ends quite quickly though, so it seems like turning your 360 on and loading up the game would take longer than this mode lasts. 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 you're stuck playing the same stage over and over, a stage which you could easily go back to inside the main adventure and actually play for some experience points. Some inter-connectivity would have been nice between the three modes, even with something as small as getting some rewards.

Treasure! Treasure!

The graphics in the game are quite nice and everything seems quite smooth. If you've seen Alien Hominid - with the "flashtoon" like feel, you know what Castle Crashers looks like. The colors are so vibrant and bold that they look great 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 succeeds in replicating them beautifully.

Recognize anyone?

As stated before, there are some bugs in Castle Crashers and the main one I found that affects everyone is the online play. The game doesn't seem to be able to support any online play; if it does manage to get a game going, you won't be playing for very long. Most of the time I would be able to get one person in a match. Getting more than one is just asking to get kicked from the server, and once we picked our characters we both got booted anyway. This is a real let down, as multiplayer is a huge aspect to this game. When playing local co-op, it's an incredibly good time. It's a shame the developers weren't able to get this going for it's launch. The other popular bug going around is memory loss issues. Though I didn't run into any of this, from my research online, it seems many people are coming back to their games to find all they Castle Crashers data is missing; which really shouldn't be happening in a finished game, especially one that has been in development for this long.

The last thing to note is that you're going to end up button mashing. Since it is a beat 'em up, you should already know that button mashing is the main concept for these kinds of games. Though, instead of just having the usual one button to hit, you do also have the option of a stronger attack and even some magic attacks. Which gets into the territory of how God of War combat takes place. You have some choice. New enemies will also make you have to think of new ways to attack, for instance you need to jump attack the guys who shoot at you with arrows. You can even jump above enemies and kill many of them without even hitting the ground, since you can do so many attacks as long as there's someone below you.

Try this on for size!

The general value you will get from Castle Crashers is that it would have been worth the 1200 points you threw down easily if not for the broken online play. Being that this was one of the few Xbox Live Arcade games to be priced over the average 800, you would expect that you should be getting your money's worth for it. Castle Crashers would reach that expectation if it weren't for the bugs 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 do so, what with all the downsides. 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.

Verdict: Buy It

Rating: 8 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12