Castle Crashers is great fun. If you like the classic, simple fun of side-scrolling beat-em-ups, you’ll enjoy this game. If you like the frantic hilarity of a cooperative/competitive four-player romp like Gauntlet or Four Swords, you’ll enjoy this game. If you like the inimitable, tongue-in-cheek, grin-inducing art and humor of The Behemoth from Alien Hominid or their many Newgrounds titles, you’ll like this game. In fact, I wish I could wholeheartedly endorse Castle Crashers as a great buy for nearly any Xbox 360 gamer. Unfortunately, if you like online multiplayer, and were hoping to get in on “this month’s only online multiplayer XBLA game” as boasted on Castle Crashers’ devblog, I’m going to have to recommend you wait a while before purchasing this one. The Behemoth seems to have gone ahead and released a semi-broken game, whose title couldn’t be more unfortunate, given the resulting problems.
It really is a shame, too, because Castle Crashers is delightfully enjoyable. The game, for those who have somehow missed out on the previews for the last two years, is a four-player, arcade-style side-scroller in the vein of classics like the arcade versions of X-Men, Dungeons & Dragons, or The Simpsons — colorful stages filled with busy backgrounds and dozens of enemies, and distinct player-controlled characters with brutal combo-based fighting moves and over-the-top special attacks. Behemoth’s typical humor is in full effect in every aspect of the game, from intentionally crude enemies and unusual items to a constant stream of in-game jokes. Enemy guards sit and read magazines while they wait for you to approach, a forest full of animals get the crap scared out of them by a humongous boss, and a river stage can be navigated while floating on the corpse of a fallen baddie.
The comparison to the D&D arcade game is also relevant thanks to the RPG-style character progression that Castle Crashers brings to the table — players are able to keep persistent profiles in their save files, keeping track of gained gold, experience, weapons, and other collectibles as they progress through the game’s many levels. Gaining a character level allows you to add points to your character’s strength, magic, defense, and agility, which becomes quite necessary as the levels start to contain harder-hitting monsters and Behemoth’s usual lineup of massive, difficult bosses. Castle Crashers also allows you to reset any of your characters back to level one, mind you, if you’ve leveled everyone up too high but still want to try the game from scratch.
As such, Castle Crashers is an enjoyable, challenging, and very amusing game. The game’s emphasis, however, and where it really shines as an enjoyable social experience, is in the multiplayer. It’s perfectly possible to run through Castle Crashers by yourself, but you will truly be missing out on the heights to which the game can soar. Bringing in up to four players will scale up simple things like treasure drops, enemy numbers, and boss strength, of course, but you really haven’t played Castle Crashers until you’ve attempted to keep up with the truly chaotic levels of mayhem occurring onscreen when the game is fighting back against a full group. Combat becomes a hysterical rush of joyous multiplayer combos as baddies are juggled from one player to the next. Scrambling for fallen treasure turns friends to foe in one moment, while seconds later, the appearance of health-restoring items suddenly drops everyone into a cooperative survival state (”No, you need it more than I do”). Multiplayer-specific mechanics even appear in the game, including the ability to revive fallen comrades in the heat of battle. Truly hilarious fun can be had while one player scrambles across the screen to lure a fearsome boss away from another player, who is desperately performing “don’t you die on me” CPR on a third player.
The game also pays homage to several staples of the beat-em-up genre, including an obstacle-dodging “vehicle” sequence a la Battletoads, end-of-stage “Fight for the Girl” PvP sequences a la Double Dragon, and more. Castle Crashers is full of little memorable moments like these, many of which are produced by the varied stage design and triggered story events, but there is plenty of opportunity to generate your own by playing with a good group of friends.
Not every element of Castle Crashers is a winner — there are occasions where the chaotic art is detrimental to the gameplay (a sequence involving chasing a wedding coach through a hail of confetti is nearly impossible to see), and it seems like the character progression during multiplayer could have used quite a bit more testing and balance. The game is friendly in that it allows drop-in/drop-out multiplayer allowing any group to pick up from the most advanced player’s progress level, but unless all players are of similar level, this can prove to be a less-than-ideal experience. Characters on the low end of the food chain will be overwhelmed by enemies in the latter stages, and find it frustrating in earlier stages to try and get kills for XP while their overpowered teammates are plowing through appropriate-level enemies quickly and easily. In addition, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the assignment of items and accessories to the players: One of our team saved up a huge deal of gold in order to purchase an especially attractive accessory, at which point he dropped it long enough for someone else to pick it up — thus permanently granting the latter player permanent, free access to said item at no cost. In groups that play through Castle Crashers together from start to finish, this will likely be a welcome addition to allow easy mutual advancement, but it’s just as likely to lead to arguments between pick-up groups who may not be as eager to share with strangers. Finally, the game’s extra modes, “Arena” and “All You Can Quaff,” are mildly amusing but largely forgettable. The former is simply a repeat of the game’s earlier PvP duels, and the latter is a button masher akin to Track and Field — fun to watch the first time, but too tiring and shallow to bear much replayability.
Which brings us, sadly, to the online multiplayer. Castle Crashers, which absolutely begs to be played with other people, includes the option to play games via Xbox LIVE with friends or strangers, but this option is, as of launch, completely broken. Attempting to use any online options at this time causes the game to fail in several different ways, from suddenly dropped games, to being dumped back to the menu, to the game outright crashing and freezing one’s console. We tried fully a dozen times to get an online game going through quick matches or private match-making options, but each attempt met with failure, and further reports coming in from all corners of the internet confirmed it wasn’t just us having a problem.
In another game, I’d be willing to chalk this problem up to unforeseen launch bugs — which can happen to anyone — but here, it’s really a major disappointment. The fact that this game has been in development for such a long, long, time (and the fact that it was allegedly complete back in mid-May) really leaves one wondering why such a glaring bug wasn’t ironed out. In addition, for a game whose emphasis is so firmly on multiplayer fun, crippling the online connectivity is going to be a dealbreaker for a large number of players. Behemoth is working on the problem already, and we’re sure everything will be fixed eventually, but it needs to be stated that Castle Crashers was released with a glaring defect. For now, at review time, this is a major problem that cannot be ignored, and we can’t give Castle Crashers an unqualified recommendation as such.
The offline portion, on the other hand, is a very positive experience. Behemoth has sunk a lot of love and character into the game, and it shows — if you can play it under the right circumstances. If you have access to three real-life friends, and an adequate supply of controllers, and the time to all play the game together from front to back so nobody is left behind progression-wise, Castle Crashers should absolutely be purchased and enjoyed. We hope to be able to say the same to everybody else at some point.
August 27th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Even-handed review.
August 28th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Great Review. Definitely was accurate.
Hopefully they get the live issues solved.
September 1st, 2008 at 10:33 am
I had no interest at all in this game until I played the demo. What fun!
Unfortunately I am going to wait until I hear the online multiplayer is fixed before I buy it.