#Castle crashers gameplay how to#

Shaun: It’s hard to see why it took this many years for a good 2D sidescroller to be released. Still, CC succeeds because the gameplay is fun, bottom line. Combos and RPG-like leveling up, for example. Three of the toughest warriors…and the cutest tiger you’ve ever seen! C-C-C-Combo MakerĬhris: The gameplay in Castle Crashers wasn’t exactly anything new, although there were some refinements to the classic brawler formula. Shaun: In the end, you saved four princesses and lost a kingdom’s worth of soldiers. I was saddened when my deery companion left me after running through that very empty sawmill. They should have been wearing red shirts. Not the most critical part of training soldiers, but then again, it was important this time. You wonder if he was ever taught which objects were soft and which weren’t. You look around at the corpses of your cavalry, and think “well, we probably could have planned that better.”Ĭhris: Yeah, one of them lands on a roasted ham instead of a cake. Shaun: Anyway, it did make me sad to see how many soldiers were killed throughout the course of the game….especially all the ones that died in the rescue attempt by failing to fall on the cake.

Lee: I would say 205% less wrist cutting if you count the cutting I did while playing FFVII.Ĭhris: And that, folks, is a scientific number. Shaun: My turn: and there was one hundred percent less wrist cutting. That’s more emotion in one scene than Cloud has in the entire game. And your characters probably had more emotional development.Ĭhris: Think about the tense expressions on their faces before they dueled to kiss the princess at the end of a level. That was just weird.Ĭhris: I mean, Castle Crashers probably tells a better story than Final Fantasy VII. There was kind of a story with the limited cutscenes, and that was enough for me. Shaun: I normally am an advocate for gaming as a storytelling medium, but in this case, I agree that less was better. You did not have to be told what was going on, you just knew. I think the lack of storytelling was one of the better parts of the game. Lee: Sometimes things do not have to make sense to be fun. Family-friendly except for all of the violence and defecating jokes.

#Castle crashers gameplay how to#

Lee: And over the course of your adventure, your characters bond and learn how to fight as one. We just get done fighting pirate ninjas, and then aliens abduct us….okay, cool. Most of the developments didn’t make sense, but were awesome nonetheless. There’s still some giant question marks (what is wrong with these deer? Where did we learn how to fly on the last level?), it didn’t hamper the experience at all. The saga takes you through multiple levels where you have to battle unique bosses.Ĭhris: Really, considering there’s barely any writing, there’s still a pretty effective story here. Evil dude jacked your princess, and you have to chase him down. They don’t screw around with the setup - it’s a quick visual thing, with barely any text in the game, and away you go. It manages to be pretty epic, but it does not take itself too seriously.Ĭhris: Yeah, humor and pacing. It’s pretty apparent early on, however, that CC sets itself apart with its humor. Shaun: The introduction follows a pretty typical premise that every single Mario title ever has used - the Princess(es) get kidnapped, and you set off to the rescue. Lee: I’m not sure there is a game with more epic title music. As soon as that title music cued up, we were already hooked. But it quickly got a lot of buzz, and it had four-player co-op, so I took a shot. Its return to a style similar to games created in the halcyon days of our youth did not go unnoticed.Ĭhris: This was one of those games I hadn’t really heard much about before it dropped on the XBLA. We were pleasantly surprised when Castle Crashers came out. The 2-D side-scrolling games were long thought to be dead. Lee: These days, we see a lot of companies abandoning simplicity for graphics. Checkpoint takes a look back at the colorful brawler, and we discuss our love/hate relationship with Corn Boss. Castle Crashers didn’t get a huge marketing campaign, but word quickly spread about the title and its quirky but addictive gameplay.

In 2008, the makers of Alien Hominid brought a four-player frenzied experience to the Xbox 360. This column originally ran on April 6, 2010.