Review: Castle Crashers

Created by:

- The Behemoth

Genre:

- 2D Side-Scroller

Release:

- Aug 27, 2008

ESRB Rating:

- T (Teen)

My Rating:

- 8 out of 10

Castle Crashers is an exiting thrill ride through an old fashion swords and sorcery setting.

Castle Crashers is an exiting thrill ride through an old fashion swords and sorcery setting. It's hack-N-slash gameplay (with added RPG type elements) has been close to mastered by the developers, and it's amazingly fun with 3 other players, yet it holds up extremely well as a single player game (making Castle Crashers a very fun Co-Op experience). The storyline is cliche, but it's known that it's an old plot that's been done before - and that's used as an advantage for some hilarious satirical comedy!

The graphics add to the charm of the game, the 2D aspect in a 3D world was well received, and there are fun animations that are beautifully done. Each character comes with a certain weapon, a certain spell (Fire, Ice, Thunder, and Poison), and they're all color-coated by the element of their magic, this makes the game more colorful and radiant.

Pictured Above: One of Castle Crasher's many colorful levels

The DLC extras for this game are nice too, and very inexpensive. In the added content, they give you three more characters (a normal knight, a general bad guy, and the king), more animals, and different levels along with different boss fights. As well as one recently released, one can play as the black knight, other bad guys, and adds even more weapons and animals.

For a download XBOX Live arcade title, this game could easily stand off as a complete separate game on itself, it offers a wonderfully large world with fantastic levels designs and new things to constantly keep you pulled in. With mini games, a separate arena challenge, and a full world of leveling - Castle Crashers is an excellent game that everybody should own.

However, there is not just praise to go along with this game. Castle Crashers is short, and DLC should have included new levels as well. The fact of the matter is, it's fun to play through Castle Crashers with some good friends one time around, there's little replay value to be had. In addition, Castle Crasher's leveling system is fun, and nicely tuned, but leveling can get old if one is going to try to get as high as they can.

All in all, Castle Crashers is a wonderful game, and well worth the little money that would be spent on it (and the DLC is cheap too).