Castle Crashers

 
Developer: The Behemoth
Steam Release: Sep 2012
Hours Played: 4.5
Similar To: Dead Pixels / Lost Castle / Rampage Knights
Rating:  2/5 Parsnips

GAMEPLAY
This fairly linear side/screen-scrolling brawler set in the days of chivalry and knights in shining armour is not your usual isometric action rpg but fighting, leveling-up, upgrading and buying of potions and weapons is all part of the routine. You play in side-view with the surface of the playing area you move around in being of a slightly tilted, isometric view so you get a fair bit of freedom to move around. Think a more sophisticated version of Dead Pixels and a slightly less complex Rampage Knights. As you move forwards (generally from left to right) enemies appear in many forms and it's your job to hack them down while getting ever closer to a shot at the boss. Jockeying for position before landing the enemy with your most efficient attack is the order of the day.
 

BALANCE & PACE
Of course, a multitude of minions are out to spoil your fun so in line with most RPGs, your favoured attack should obviously depend upon which skill-set you've put most points into when you've been at the upgrade screen. You obviously wouldn’t exclusively use a magic attack if you've ploughed all your points in agility. The bosses offer decent challenges but there are times when you’ll need to stock up on plenty of health potions to bring to the fight. As a single-player experience the game is solid and quite a bit of fun if not a little pedestrian and mechanical. As such, to prevent it becoming just another grind-fest, it’s one to put about an hour into per session before moving onto something else. 

PRESENTATION & DESIGN
Your colourful start-screen features many interesting and informative paths including a statistics screen featuring all the useful facts about your knights. On clicking Local Game you get to choose your red, green, orange, blue or grey knight plus any extra characters you'll get along the way. Newcomers will initially need to battle their way through hostiles to get to the castle keep (or shop) before they get access to the map. Lose this first battle which is entirely possible and you’ll need to start the first few screens again. In the game, after you leave a battle, you’re taken to a simple hand-drawn map where you can move your avatar over a path of connected small circles each representing the different areas that you fight or upgrade in. Later areas are, of course, padlocked and can only be unlocked by clearing previous ones.

PROGRESS SYSTEM
On leveling up you are awarded a couple of skill points that you put into a choice of four classic RPG skill-sets: strength, magic, defence and agility. From the map-screen you can enter a blacksmith area where you can choose your weapon, and a castle keep for potions etc. If you’re having trouble with a particular boss you can always get stronger by leveling up, upgrading and/or buying potions – and then going back to have another crack. Progress then is in the form of a typical RPG. Thankfully, Castle Crashers is generous in giving the player lots of different coloured knights to choose from so you can have one colour each for a melee, an archer and magic user. There is a Leaderboard that shows how you fair in rank order for the main campaign along with scores and best times for the Arena and Back off Barbarian modes (not covered in this review).
 

CONCLUSION
As a game set-up nicely for the multiplayer crowd, the single-player campaign for Castle Crashers may seem a little bland for the action-junkies out there. Nevertheless, with a set of five characters to choose from, the game lends itself nicely to those who would like to try out one melee-based, one magic-based and one ranged based character to see how they compare. A slight negative is to do with the controls; you need to learn a lot of attacks and, hence, a lot of combinations which may not suit those with poor memories. Furthermore you may well need to relearn all those combos when you return to the game after a long absence. Still, Castle Crashers is a decent game that tests your skill suitably enough and I would still recommend it to anyone who likes their games related to platform brawlers.