Castle Crashers – Xbox Live Arcade, 2008, The Behemoth

Story – 5.0/10.0

Gameplay – 9.0/10.0

Design – 9.5/10.0

Control – 10.0/10.0

Sound – 9.0/10.0

Fun Factor – 8.5/10.0

Overall – 9.0/10.0

Castle Crashers is a splendid little piece of downloadable angel food cake for your Xbox 360. At the low price of 1200 points, how can you say no to those brilliant elemental knights and their unstoppable desire to crash castles? Kingdoms everywhere should be worried. Castles–they will be crashed.

Enter, brave warrior. Details lie within.

Story – 5.0/10.0

The story in Castle Crashers is really a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there’s really not much story at all. Aside from probably, oh, five cut scenes, each lasting less than 20 seconds, it’s mostly just beating stuff up. The story is simplistic at best–an evil wizard took a big crystal from your king’s throne, and also kidnapped four princesses. Go get that stuff back, and stop the wizard. That’s it!

On the other hand, what is there is fantastically executed. Cut scenes are done with in-game graphics, so they don’t disrupt your immersion in the campy, violent world Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin have created for you. The cut scenes are usually hilarious, aside from (possibly) inappropriate toilet humor in the forest level. As far as I’m concerned, the impossibly basic storyline only works to Castle Crashers‘ advantage. It’s enjoyable every time. I dock it five points for lack of complexity, but the five points I am giving it are marvelous.

Gameplay – 9.0/10.0

Let’s get something straight. Castle Crashers is a beat ‘em up game. Don’t even try whining about lack of depth in the combat, of whatever other unfounded argument you might choose to attack the game with. Castle Crashers is a beat ‘em up game. I remember seeing scathing reviews of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed that went on and on about lack of depth in the gameplay, and I couldn’t help but laugh. You can’t attack a beat ‘em up for being a beat ‘em up. Come on now. That’s unreasonable, is it not?

Now then. Castle Crashers plays exactly how it needs to. You’ve got several options for how to play, but you’re going to spend most of your time in the story mode, aptly titled “Castle Crashers.” There are two other options, the first of which is “All You Can Quaff,” a bizarre name for a minigame that has you pressing X and Y alternatively to eat food faster than the other players, and after each finished food item, pressing A to drop a new one from the sky. Good fun, of course.

Then there’s the main multiplayer section: Arena. Arena mode puts you into one of the coliseums found around the Castle Crashers game world with your (no doubt smiling) compatriots, playing under one of four sets of rules: Melee, Quickdraw, Treasure, and Beefy.

Melee is basically a regular arena match from Castle Crashers mode. Use your melee weapon, your bow, and your spells to kill your friends!

Quickdraw limits you to your bow and your shield. Food appears for healing, and flaming arrows appear to increase the agility of whoever picks them up. As your agility increases, so does the strength of your arrows, the speed as which they can be fired, and your run speed. Rest assured, insanity ensues.

Treasure has you competing to dig up treasure with your shovel. You can attack one another as well as steal items your opponents have just unearthed. A lot more fun than it sounds!

Beefy is a lot like Melee, only everyone is super huge, and can’t use items or spells. Mostly silliness.

But yes, as I said: The main thing you’ll want to play is Castle Crashers mode for the most part, since it’s the most rewarding. You’ll start out with only four playable characters: Blue Knight, Green Knight, Red Knight, and Orange Knight, with ice, acid/poison, lightning, and fire powers, respectively. However, you’ll quickly unlock the Grey Knight, with more martial spells, (arrows falling from the sky, bombs, etc.) and other characters will soon find their way onto your roster.

As well as new characters, you’ll also find a whole plethora of weapons and pets. Weapons range from lobsters to fishing poles to lightsabers, and are saved to your Xbox profile, so that if you’ve gotten a weapon with any character, all of your future characters will have access to them as well. Most weapons have a level requirement, however, so you can’t start the game with a +7 defense/+2 agility bonus from your necromancer sword. Pets work the same way, sans level requirement, so you can use a floating ram who head butts enemies, a cardinal who helps you find secret items, a giraffe who increases the amount of experience you gain, or any of a great number of other silly things right from the get-go. The pets aren’t exclusive, either, so if all four players want to use stat-boosting chickens, you’re more than free to do so.

My only real complaint is that the players’ health bars occasionally cover up text from things like weapon statistics or level requirements. It’s easily worked around by a little verbal communication, but still. You’d think a quick fix like hiding health bars in town or something could have been implemented. Oh, and also: I have encountered an error twice now where an enemy gets stuck, damageable but unkillable, preventing the advancement of a certain level. Redoing the stage is frustrating, but at least all players get their recently garnered experience points anyway.

There’s lots of challenge, and lots of depth here. It all sounds rather simple on paper, but despite many hours of play and several runs of the story on different characters, it remains satisfying and fulfilling to decapitate men with chainmail over their faces before I hop back on my camel to jog jauntily across more desert.

A word of caution, however: don’t play this game alone. It’s still fun, but far more difficult and its shelf life will be reduced from days to hours. There aren’t many things quite as splendid as picking level one Castle Crashers characters and running the story start to finish with three friends on a Friday night.

Design – 9.5/10.0

Every last thing in Castle Crashers has a (hopefully) familiar Alien Hominid-esque style to it. Given the creators of both games, there’s not much guesswork to be done on why that is. But hey! Having the same art style as Alien Hominid is far from a bad thing. Weapons, pets, and characters are all colorful and varied. The stages are memorable. The bosses are memorable. The experience is memorable, and that’s due in large part to the fact that everything just looks so darn tasty. I deduct half a point because of the excessive crapping in the forest level.

Control – 10.0/10.0

Controls are well-mapped and responsive. Button combos are simple, effective, and easy to remember. I really haven’t had a single problem with the controls after probably 20-25 hours of playing the game. Absolutely no complaints.

Sound – 9.0/10.0

As far as sound effects go, beating stuff up sounds like beating stuff up. What more could you ask for, really? Music, on the other hand, is campy when it needs to be, and sets appropriately dark moods at times. One of the most fun game soundtracks to come out in a good long time.

Fun Factor – 8.5/10.0

This is a really, really entertaining game. It will become repetitive if you keep playing, of course, but I’m still enjoying the hell out of it, and I’ve beaten it four times. There’s nothing quite like progressing your character through more and more efficient castle crashing. The lure of characters such as the Ninja and Fire Demon are great, let me assure you. Writing this review has actually been more of a break from playing it than anything. It calls to me!

Overall – 9.0/10.0

Inviting friends over for Castle Crashers is a great way to guarantee a good time. It’s got the same silly mini-game appeal that games like Mario Party and Wario Ware have, coupled with the extra depth of a simple dungeon crawler like Dungeon Siege. It thankfully takes none of the hassles from RPGs. No complicated inventory systems, elaborate pre-battle planning, or any such nonsense. Castle Crashers is about having a fantastic time, and it drives that goal home with every slain thief wearing a bag over its head. If you’re still not sold, here’s some gameplay:

So there you go. What do you think? Do you like the game? Ever played it? 1200 points too much? Tell us in the comments!