This week I embarked on putting my time and money towards Castle Crashers, it's finally been released after being kicked around and being shown for about 3 years. If you ever grew up when arcades were still around and remember plunking lots of quarters into some of the great 4-player beat em' ups like TMNT, X-Men, and The Simpsons then you'll feel right at home here.
At its heart Castle Crashers is a 4-player Beat Em' Up with some light RPG elements to it. There's 20 levels that you and hopefully 3 other people will be marching through. If you don't have some people to invite over, you can find people to play with over XBL. You and your respective friends or strangers that you've just met over Live will move from left to right beating the crap out of the onslaughts of enemies that are thrown your way. Each Knight is imbued with his respective power, whether it be poison, fire, ice, or lightning. So as you're fighting you can use magic, your blade or a combination of the two, and as you level up more and more you'll gain more combos. If you level up during a level afterwards you get to pour some that XP into Strength, Magic, Agility, and Health. Those may or may not be the exact names, I can't recall at this moment but you get the idea. The game is very addictive and you'll constantly be wanting to level up your character, as well as finding new weapons that enemies drop while moving around the levels. There are 20 additional characters to unlock and level up as well. There are also 26 Animal Orbs to find and collect throughout the levels, you bring them along with you and they imbue your character with either more health, more defense, quickness through water, higher jumping, all sorts of things that you'll want to play around with.
Past the main game you can also play offline or online two mini-games, there's the Arena and All You Can Quaff. The Arena is pretty self-explanatory, you either fight one another or if you run in solo you fight waves and waves of enemies. It's fun and I've heard getting far into it by yourself nets you some hidden items. Then there's All You Can Quaff which plays sort of like the mini-games that were between some levels in The Simpsons Arcade game, you mash two buttons repeatedly to eat the food in front of your Knight, then press another button to ring a bell and have a new dish thrown in front of your character. You keep going until you eat a certain amount of food. It's fun but apparently I lack my old button mashing skills, against the CPU I'm fine, but I tried a few Ranked matches online and always came in 2nd. It's not the games fault but it was frustrating. I probably won't play it too much as I'd like to keep my X and Y buttons intact for as long as possible.
Finally I feel I have to mention some issues with the game that I'm sure in the coming weeks will be patched and completely gone, still I want to throw them out there in case it may deter anyone from picking it up right away. Right now it's difficult to find and jump straight into an Online game, and once you do find one sometimes you may not even get through an entire level before the game freezes up. Lastly, there's been some save issues where the save file gets corrupted or it just doesn't save for you, so you might exit the game and return the next day to find that your LVL30 Knight is back to LVL15 or whatever the case may be. Like I said, The Behemoth realizes these issues and is already on the case to patch them up and make them a thing of the past.
So what's the verdict on the game? Well, I wouldn't outright tell everyone I know to go drop $15 dollars on this game, but I in no way dislike the game and would say just skip it altogether. I recommend that you get the Trial version and see where you stand on it. If you're like me and grew up playing all those quarter eating Beat Em' Ups chances are you'll be crazy in love with this game, if you've never had those nostalgia pangs you might walk away feeling better with $15 still in your pocket. At the end of the day, it's a wonderful game and one that will be even better once it gets the patch treatment.
Final Verdict: Trial It
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