Castle Crashers is the greatest "Beat 'em up" ever conceived.
The "Side Scrolling Beat 'Em Up" genre of games is mostly dead. These games gained popularity with Double Dragon back in 1987 and continued to gain momentum with games like Final Fight and later Streets of Rage. There was a Beat 'em up released in 1996 called Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. You were able to choose between classes that had their own special abilities. During combat you could cycle through menus of items and spells to cast and would even gain levels and upgrade your weapon as you journeyed through the game. This was an incredibly ambitious title for '96 and received a lot of critical acclaim but has been a bit forgotten over the years.
Alex and I have beaten Shadow over Mystara and it is an amazing title. I talk about this game because I feel like it helped pave the way for Castle Crashers.
Castle Crashers is the brain-child of Dan Paladin and Thomas Fulp, the creators of Alien Hominid and co-founders of The Behemoth video game development company. Let me start off by saying Dan's art style is riveting. Every line he crafts into his 2-D creations breath a kind of adorable insanity that captures the imagination. That alone makes this game fun to look at but it helps that its fun to play too.
Much like Shadow of Mystara, you gain experiences points for killing enemies. As you gain levels, you can put points into your strength, magic, defense, or agility. Putting points into magic increases how fast your mana recharges, how much damage your magic deals, and grants you access to new spells. Agility increases how fast you move, how quickly you recover from being hit, and your overall archery speed and damage. Strength and defense just effect things numerically. They're important, but they don't give you quite the same feeling of progress for putting points into them.
Similar to Shadow of Mystara, you find new weapons to use in combat. These are usually just bought at shops or randomly dropped by an enemy you kill. These aren't just straight upgrades as they will actually change the balance of your characters, often giving penalties along with their benefits. Late in the game, the benefits often outweigh the penalties.
Kind of like Shadow of Mystara, you can choose from a variety of characters. You start off with a choice between four Knights, each representing either fire, ice, lightning, or poison. As you progress through the game defeating bosses and winning arena battles, you gain access to new characters. The magic between all these characters varies wildly, and the bonus characters also vary a bit in their base statistics.
Not at all like Shadow of Mystara, you collect "Animal Orbs". These little guys float by your side and give you bonuses that range from increased swim speed to attack your enemies to just giving some of your stats a boost.
I play through the entire game with Alex and had a blast. I found myself laughing a lot at the game's bizarre sense of humor. Being able to really customize my character was great and really made me feel like I was always working towards something even if I was playing through a level again just for the sheer pleasure of it. This game also never repeats a boss, which is far more than I can say for pretty much any game that comes out lately. From Devil May Cry to Streets of Rage, you will fight some or all of the bosses more than once. Castle Crashers saves you the bore and always throws something completely new at you.
The one complaint I have are the frequent connection problems that I have while playing online. This isn't just for me; it is a rampant problem. The guys over at behemoth have promised that a patch will be released soon to to fix the problems sometime in the near unspecified future.
The best part about this game has to be length. I can easily see myself spending more time playing this game than I did Orange Box, a game that had an original retail price of sixty dollars. This game is fifteen bucks. Its cheap and beautiful and unique and you can play it with your friends. Just be careful when you play it online.
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