I had been spending the past few weeks playing a bit of Call of Duty 4 online, trying to figure out what game I’d be hitting up next. While lazily browsing a few gaming blogs last Wednesday, I came across some news which restructured my entire weekend. It had turned out that on the 27th, a little game known as “Castle Crashers” was released by The Behemoth. I heard about this game a year or so back, and was very excited at the prospect of a fresh beat-em-up to come to the picture, especially with the same art style of their first game, Alien Hominid. With the release being so far away, I must have tried to forget about it a bit to quash my anticipation.
Needless to say, I rushed to download the game, and convince some of my friends to do likewise. When I was younger and arcades were still common, beat-em-ups (Fists of Rage, Final Fight) were incredibly common. One franchised beat-em-up, The Simpson’s arcade game had received the majority of my spending money. With The Behemoth behind this project, and the promise of four player online co-op, I was nothing less than giddy.
Overview
From Wikipedia
The game is a side-scrolling beat-em-up in which up to 4 players can play, online or locally. Playing as one of the available knights or an unlockable character, players must defeat enemies to progress using attacks and magic. As enemies are defeated, the characters level up, giving access to new combos and abilities, and players can improve attributes such as attack, magic, defense and agility.
Overall Reaction
Great art, great music, a creative story progression, a pretty good combo system, and a ton of replayability make this game well worth its purchase. I have personally beaten the game probably about six times or more, either by myself or with friends. Despite the large amount of playtime, I have failed to truly get bored of the game. After you’ve beaten the game, you can revisit levels to find 60+ hidden or acquirable weapons. To aid you in your quests, you can currently collect up to 26 “pets” whom either alter your character’s stats, or they preform actions of their own (attack the enemies, find/point out hidden items, or bring you food). After your character’s leveled up and can fly through the regular game without a sweat, you could try your hand at Insane Mode, where your enemies are much harder to put down. And either before or after you’ve collected all the weapons and pets, you can unlock up to 23 characters by beating the game with different characters, or unlocking characters by beating the single player arenas.
What makes this game truly shine however, is the multiplayer co-op. When you add the ability to throw friends in the mix (both online or locally), one play through to the next is a different, yet enjoyable experience. Surprisingly, even playing online co-op is just as responsive as playing locally. If anything, I can count the momentary slowdowns I’ve experienced on one hand.
Lastly, some of the community members at the GameFaq and NeoGAF forums have impressed me with the determination to find every unlockable item within the game. From pets, to weapons, to characters, it’s been a 24-hour manhunt for almost a week now, trying to figure out what sequence it takes to unlock some characters and weapons that have surfaced in some testing/press images that were released. The Behemoth is obviously having a good time with the community of hunters, as they gave no outright explanations to begging fans at the past PAX 2008, only to leave the mobs of unlockable-hungry (myself included) players searching in the dark for the few holy grails left in the game. It would seem that the game has quite a bit of room for some DLC to come into play to potentially unlock these characters, I would hope that The Behemoth plays to the stingy and reveals free means to obtaining the unlockables.
What I’d Change
Abracadab…
Magic in this game seems to be very one-dimensional. While it does seem to have some sort of effect against the type of enemy you’re fighting, there doesn’t seem to be some sort of teaming-up aspect between the skills when playing co-op. Other than the attacks themselves, it feels like magic could be easily expanded on as an improvement to the game. I remember in The Simpson’s beat-em-up, players could combine to form one unit, with one player attacking and the other controlling movement. You could combine something like fire and ice, the ice magic would freeze the opponents feet while the fire burned his head, or make fire more potent when someone was poisoned. Either way, I wish there was more depth to the differences and cooperation of magic that would make choosing a varied amount of characters important to gameplay, rather than just feeling like the majority of magic was merely a sprite switch.
No Sea Legs
Sadly, the entire “water” bit of the game, where you fight ninjas aboard a ship lasts only for only two waves of enemies. With a few long desert levels following, why was so much cut (or not added) to the ship level? That level had my favorite music throughout the entire game, and it ended sooner than it started. You could have characters jumping from ship to ship, fighting off waves of ninjas, avoiding cannon balls, and the like. It’s not like we’re worried about repetition here, the entire game is comprised of beating up several enemies, moving on, and beating up several more enemies. Lastly, I agree that ninjas are awesome, but why didn’t we get pirates too? I’d love to play through the game hobbling on a peg-leg and slashing my enemies with a hook or sword.
One road diverged in a yellow wood..
To get all the known characters at this point, one would have to play the game through twelve times. While I may find myself doing that eventually, the game could offer some sense of multiple passages that offer different means to reach the boss at the end of the level, either a way requires more magic, or stamina, or just provides a different experience to the player, it could ease up on the monotony of wanting the play through the game several times, without the ability of being able to do a play through with your eyes closed.
QA Issues
While my issues with QA as of late will be saved for a post on its own, it seems that some of the bigger known bugs in the game may have been able to be caught with either better managed QA, or simply a larger team, or more time in testing before release. There are multiple instances of glitches and bugs in the game that others have found. One that my friend and I found while playing (that hasn’t been posted on YouTube yet), is when you are in the desert, and go inside to where you can see one pet (I think it’s ScratchPaw) hiding behind a screened window. If you walk up the stairs on the left side, and jump quite a bit, you end up glitching into the ceiling and are walking outside of the building. We were able to fall down into where ScratchPaw was (before we found a bomb would have gotten us back there), and then we found ourselves stuck in the level, not being able to progress to the next room. On top of these in game glitches, it seems the game has had a myriad of online play and saving issues when 3-4 players get together to play online. Coupled with matchmaking problems over Xbox Live, we can only hope that any next iteration is throughly stress tested before it’s next release. Thankfully, for the current players of CC, we should be seeing an update/fix to our online/saving woes soon.
End Scene
I’ve almost memorized the names of all the people involved and thanked in this game. Can we please skip the ending scene after we’ve seen it five times already?
Episodic Content/DLC
While this isn’t something I would necessarily change in the game, I would go and say that a few things could be added that would continue to keep me coming back for more. I think this game could easily continue bringing in money if more levels were added, and new content/abilities were tossed in the mix to keep things fresh. I wouldn’t mind paying for things to add to gameplay, but I don’t know how excited I would be if The Behemoth simply just threw new weapons and characters up for purchase. I’m not too fond of the Bad Company approach, and I hope it doesn’t become a habit.
If you own an Xbox 360, you need to pickup this game.
I’ll be spending the next few posts going over some more XBLA/PSN downloadable games.
