Castle Crashers
Review
A fun hack n' slasher
by MarvellousG
reviewed on X360
Different Beast
Ask anybody who played Alien Hominid, and they’ll tell you great things. You might have heard of superb hand-drawn visuals, incredibly challenging and rewarding gameplay, and stacks of secrets and unlockables. So it will come as no surprise that the Behemoth, the team behind Alien Hominid, is now back with a game that looks very similar on the surface. It has got fantastic, cartoony visuals, a great soundtrack, but make no mistake, Castle Crashers is a very different beast to Alien Hominid.
You will start off by picking a level one character, before you are dropped into an amusing and brief cutscene. Within twenty seconds, you have reached the game’s only real area; combat.
Combat
It is important for any hack n’ slasher to have excellent combat, otherwise all it would have to fall back upon would be light RPG elements, which wouldn’t hold up a game. So it should come as a relief that Castle Crashers does have great combat. As is now becoming the norm, you have a light attack, strong attack, ranged weapon, melee weapon, and magic. At the start of the game your character will have few moves, and be quite weak with magic that barely even sunburns your enemies, let alone scorches them. But that is where the RPG elements come into play.
Every time you reach a set number of experience points, you are given the chance to upgrade your stats at the end of the level. There are four areas of potential expertise: strength, magic, defence and agility. All very standard RPG skill sets, but the power you gain with each new level is really noticeable in Castle Crashers. Early bosses for whom you needed potions to best before can be defeated in literally under ten seconds with a higher level character. And there are plenty of bosses to wage war with, most of which are incredibly bizarre and amusing.
Humor and Unique Elements
The Behemoth showed that they had an unusual sense of humour with Alien Hominid, and they are back to their bizarre jokes in this game again. Whether it is an owl dying due to extreme bowel movements, a deer propelled to rocket speed by their own faeces, sandwiches which make you double in size and strength, or one of the most bizarre endings I have seen in a while from videogames, there will always be something to either disgust or amuse you.
Castle Crashers does have a few unique elements that you won’t find in other examples of the genre, though. The pets are a case in point. Early on in the game you will begin to pick up small creatures, one of which you can have follow you around for the whole game. Each has a special ability that will help you in or out of combat. Examples range from gaining more experience per kill, upping your strength or defence, or making rarer items appear more often. Each is useful in a different way, and there is fun to be had trying out different combinations of pets and skill sets.
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
