Castle Crashers

I’ve spoken out about my personal feelings about the seventh generation of video games (roughly 2006-2013 ie. Xbox 360, Wii, PS3) plenty of times before. It was the generation that capitalized on the cinematic properties of the medium and was the start of gaming becoming an incredibly accessible commodity. Games like Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed, and Uncharted 2 were already being treated as modern classics, but I’ve always found certain discrepancies with all of these games. This was the generation in which gaming lost itself and got too caught up with trying to rival other mediums. In the midst of all of this, something else emerged that was completely different from the critically lauded triple-A titles. The landscape of triple-A games gave way to the indie game boom, simpler alternatives to the narrative-heavy triple-A titles. Nowadays, indie games practically dominate the marketplace, or at least they seem on par with triple-A titles in terms of popularity and critical acclaim. Indie games from this generation like Braid, Super Meat Boy, and The Binding of Isaac have proven to become greatly influential over the past decade. However, my favorite indie game from this generation is Castle Crashers; a beat-em-up from Newgrounds subsidiary developer The Behemoth, the creators of sixth generation indie darling Alien Hominid. While being limited to the budget of an indie developer, Castle Crashers always felt more substantial to me than the it’s triple-A contemporaries. It’s focal point was something that was sorely missed in the triple-A games of this time: the concept of fun, in which it achieves this through a myriad of aspects.

Of course, all video games are essentially supposed to be fun. Why else would anyone play them? What I’m trying to illustrate here is that Castle Crashers is the seventh generation game I had the most fun with when the seventh generation was the current one. Out of all of the video games from this generation that garnered praise for their narratives and technical achievements, this endearing indie tribute to beat-em-ups was the game that won me over. Simply put, Castle Crashers is a ton of fun. Castle Crashers is a subtle reminder about simpler, humbler eras of gaming’s past. While progress in any medium is essential to its survival, sometimes providing something that recalls a medium’s roots can be refreshing. Saying this, Castle Crashers isn’t an explicit retro throwback. Indie games from this period may borrow heavily from the past, but uphold many modern sensibilities that elevate it to the standards of 21st century gaming. Castle Crashers utilizes the best aspects of the beat-em-up genre with it’s modern sensibilities to create what I consider to be the best the genre has to offer.

Simplicity is the key for any of these indie games. It’s the contrasting direction from the triple-A games that gives credence to the production of low budget indie games. Beat-em-ups are inherently uncomplicated action games with simple mechanics, fitting for an era where developers could only offer so much in terms of presentation and gameplay. Playing something inherently simple in a time in which game developers were trying to compete with the grandiose narratives of feature films seemed comparatively fresh. It’s not to say that Castle Crashers is minimalistic. It’s simply a game without any pretentious need to raise the bar for the potential of gaming as a medium. It’s a tried and true beat-em-up, and it doesn’t strive to be anything else. It’s also a game that doesn’t take itself very seriously. The crude sense of humor that is synonymous with the Newgrounds brand is readily featured throughout Castle Crashers. In a time where triple-A games verged into the realms of melodrama (Gears of War, The Last Of Us), it’s invigorating to play a game in which you ride a deer being propelled by it’s constant flow of liquid shit in an homage to the Turbo Tunnel from Battletoads.

The simplistic nature of the beat-em-up genre also does not warrant a magnificent story either. Four knights of different colors are busy dancing in their keep when a fellow knight bursts through the door and tumbles down the stairs to his death. The kingdom is being invaded by a dark wizard and an army of barbarian soldiers. The dark wizard steals a giant red gemstone of ambiguously grand power along with four princesses. The four princesses are divided between four different constituents who arrange a forced marriage with each princess. The four knights (or 1-4 depending on how many people are playing) must venture across the land to liberate the princesses from unrequited matrimony and defeat the dark wizard. The story of Castle Crashers is essentially the most basic of stories, rooting back to tales from the middle ages. It’s like The Canterbury Tales with more scatalogical humor, presented in an interactive rough-hewn, flash cartoon. Judging from all of the medieval elements from Castle crashers such as the knights, kings, wizardry, etc. The Behemoth’s goal was to offer the basis of the most simple fantasy foreground and let the style and gameplay give this tired narrative its substance. Conversely, many triple-A games from this time would do the exact opposite.

The most readily apparent aspect of Castle Crashers is it’s aesthetic. The Behemoth’s signature style is derived from the flash animation look of Newgrounds. The chibi characters face’s are expressive and the animation looks endearingly unrefined. This amateurish style is less indicative of the lower budget of an indie developer and more of a branding on the developer’s part. The Behemoth is a subsidiary of Newgrounds with the same animators on staff, so the graphics naturally look like a flash game from the website. Castle Crashers has the essence of a flash game, but looks much more polished and well-attended than Alien Hominid ever did. The 2003 Behemoth game Alien Hominid seemed more like an ambitious attempt to release a popular flash game into the big leagues of console stardom. Surprisingly, they succeeded, but the final product was still a bit undercooked. The final product wasn’t exactly console material as it still upheld too many of the raw elements of a flash game. Castle Crashers on the other hand feels like a game worthy of primetime. Castle Crashers was never a flash game on Newgrounds before it’s 2008 release on the Xbox marketplace. It’s a creation entirely from The Behemoth, only using Newgrounds as self-referential easter eggs and borrowing the website’s warped sense of humor. Castle Crashers even has an Alien Hominid themed level and the titular character is a playable character. It’s almost as if the impetus for releasing Alien Hominid on consoles was to finance The Behemoth’s first full project totally removed from Newgrounds, putting themselves on the frontlines of the gaming industry. Alien Hominid walked so Castle Crashers could run. The developers use flash animation graphics in Castle Crashers not as a means of having to fall back due to a cheap budget, but to highlight the full potential of them. The animated graphics look amazing and were a breath of fresh air from the gritty, realistic graphics from triple-A games of the time.

The aesthetic of Castle Crashers isn’t the only aspect of improved refinement over Alien Hominid. My biggest discrepancy with Alien Hominid was the difficulty, and it’s what kept me from enjoying the game as a result. Selling a flash game on consoles with an arcade style level of difficulty seemed inappropriate, especially in an era where this type of difficulty was unfashionable. Castle Crashers seems more aware of modern gaming sensibilities, making for a more accessible experience. Maybe this is just due to beat-em-ups generally being less harsh on players than run and gun games, but Castle Crashers still uses less conventional tactics than most old school beat-em-ups. Dan Paladin, the co-founder of The Behemoth, claims that the biggest influence on Castle Crashers is River City Ransom, a classic beat-em-up for the NES. He says the influence of River City Ransom went into the expressiveness of the characters in Castle Crashers, their bulging, wide-eyed expressions as they are hit. Another influence from River City Ransom that I can clearly see is the RPG elements. The player’s character will level up incrementally through combat. After returning to the world map for whatever reason, the player has a choice to scale their character in four different attributes: strength, magic, defense, and agility. The player can also choose to use this system to make a balanced character like I usually do. Leveling up happens often enough where one doesn’t have to worry about one stat being neglected, unless you choose to put all of your eggs in one basket. This RPG scaling gives the difficulty curve a natural sense of progression. The game assumes that with each level, the player has gotten better at it and treats the difficulty of every subsequent level accordingly. That being said, the most difficult level in the game is “Full Moon”. It’s near the end of the game, but it’s much harder than the last few levels after it, making it the only exception to this fairly consistent rule.

The consistent level of difficulty is aided by the fluidity of the combat. Beat-em-ups tend to have more rigid controls, but the combat in Castle Crashers is so graceful that it feels like ballet dancing. This is probably due to the fact that the characters can fight their enemies while suspended in the air. If the player jumps and executes a stronger attack, they can hoist an enemy up in the air for a direct line of combos. Most old-school beat em-ups are restricted to an awkward range of movement, but playing Castle Crashers always feels so buoyant and free-flowing. The controls are the best out of any beat-em-up I’ve played. Castle Crashers may offer an experience with great humor and charm, but these buttery smooth controls are objectively what gives it the advantage over every other beat-em-up.

The combat in most beat-em-ups also tends to get stale and repetitive, but Castle Crashers makes sure to elongate the player’s attention by offering a slew of combat variations. The blacksmith’s hub is a menagerie of different swords the player can use, exhibited along the insides of his giant frog buddy. There are over 60 different swords/handheld weapons the player can use with each of them having their own statistical perks as well. One of the attributes the player can increase in the stats menu is magic. Every playable character has magic, but the type of magic differs between all of them. The four main knights all have different elemental magic for example. The green knight can poison people with a cloud of green gas, the red knight has electricity powers, the orange knight has fire, and the blue knight can freeze enemies with ice magic. Other playable characters share some of the same elemental magic as the four knights, but the standard magic for most characters are arrows and bombs. Upgrading magic will make it stronger and grant the player with new abilities like projectile magic, practical in combat and as varied in movement as attacking with the handheld weapons. Sandwiches are consumable items in which the player goes through a transformation like the Incredible Hulk. It gives the player a ten second window of roid-rage to rip doors off their hinges, batter small enemies, and wrestle with larger enemies under the same effects. Animal buddies are another facet to combat. These small creatures will float over the player’s shoulders offering support whenever needed. There are at least 30 of them and they each come with their own unique abilities. Some animal buddies will aid you in traversal, some in combat, and some with finding secrets and retrieving health items. They’re also so goddamn adorable.

The world of Castle Crashers is wide and sprawling with a vast array of landscapes. The barbarian levels on the helm of the king’s castle are reminiscent of battles from Lord of the Rings. The industrial castle is a series of death traps where platforming becomes a means of survival. The journey on the high seas involves the player’s ship being ambushed by pirate ninjas, everyone’s favorite argument coming to a compromise. The desert leads to discovering a monumentally large sand castle ending in a game of volleyball for a prize. The ice level is a quaint village of eskimos accompanied by the most captivating music track in the entire game. These aren’t the only levels in the game, but a select few examples highlight the variety each level has to keep the journey from getting stagnant. The enemies throughout the game are also varied, but usually only in terms of aesthetical design. Whether they be bears, arabs, barbarians, or eskimos, they are all based off of the same model as the four knights. There are some deviations to this like the quicksand bugs in the desert and the fish in the flooded temple area, but the sword-wielding enemies that look like different shades of your character will be the most common enemy type.

While the enemies aren’t exactly diverse, the bosses make up for this in spades. Castle Crashers offers an incredibly diverse range of bosses not only in terms of cosmetics, but tactical means to defeat them. Many of these bosses also carry more depth in gameplay than the average beat-em-up. The catfish boss is a very durable foe, sustaining minimal damage with each sword hit. Every time he coughs up a hairball, it’s supposed to drift into the king’s ship. A cannonball is then fired at the catfish, putting him in a daze and making him more vulnerable. The game doesn’t outright explain that this is the proper way to defeat the boss, so the player has to find this out for themselves. The Painter will quickly paint on an empty canvas and his crude drawing will come to life and chase you down. The drawings will dissipate in a cloud of crayola-colored dust if the player comes in contact with them, but doing this will result in taking a heaping amount of damage. The player adapts around this gimmick and learns to use magic/arrows to defeat them. The bosses presented here are much more multifaceted than the standard beat-em-up bosses, in which blocking and attacking are the only means to defeat them.

While Castle Crashers is an enjoyable experience by oneself, this game was meant to be played with other people. Why would the game initially offer the player four different choices of playable characters if this wasn’t true? Playing Castle Crashers on co-op with my friends and my brother has resulted in some of my favorite gaming experiences with other people. Playing this game alone comparatively just isn’t the same after you’ve shared the experience with one or more people. Co-op also fixes a few minor gameplay hiccups. For one, the potions automatically heal when the player’s health drops to zero instead of having to scroll through one’s inventory to find one before one’s health plummets. Co-op also adds a feature in which each player fights to the death for the princesses. Winning in these skirmishes does not net the player any gameplay advances, but it’s always entertaining to see how virulently each person will decapitate their friends they’ve been journeying with all this time to earn a princess's affections. The victor may have achieved some action, but has caused an awkward rift between his friends that will always permeate through the experience. Also, the reveal of the last princess isn’t the same unless one is playing with a friend who has no idea what’s going to happen, especially if that’s the only princess they’ve earned. I always enjoy watching their expectations get dashed at the sound of that hilarious clown honk like the bastard I am.

After the dark wizard is defeated, one will realize that the sweet experience that was Castle Crashers was also a short one. Fortunately, Castle Crashers has a spectacular replay value. The game is a perfect length which is fantastic considering all of the unlockables one earns by completing the game a numerous amount of times. There are over 30 playable characters in Castle Crashers and most of them are unlocked through beating the game with another character. I’ve owned this game for twelve years, played through it with over 10 different characters, and I still haven’t unlocked every playable fighter. I’ve still got a lot left to go, and I’d be willing to play this game as many times as possible to complete the full character roster. There is also an insane mode, a more difficult version of the main campaign that is substantially more difficult than regular Castle Crashers. I’ve still yet to complete insane mode with any character.

Castle Crashers is a simple game that does not attempt anything ambitious in gameplay or narrative. Of course, the game proves that something doesn’t have to break boundaries in order to perform on an exceptional level. I really can’t think of any qualms with Castle Crashers, even playing it over a decade later as an adult. A simple game should not warrant a perfect score from me, but I can’t think of any reason why it should not deserve one. All of the stylistic elements combined with the smooth gameplay, variation, and replay value make it the best beat-em-up I’ve ever played and give credence to my partially-biased opinion that it’s one of the best games from it’s era. I’d play this over Halo 3 or Uncharted 2 any day of the week.

Programmer Tom Fulp, founder of flash site Newgrounds, also founded a video game development company called Behemoth to release titles made with the intention of bringing what was considered "old-school" styles of gaming into the mainstream, which started with run-and-gun style gameplay with Alien Hominid in 2004, and then eventually beat-em-up style gameplay with Castle Crashers in 2008.
With animation drawn in artist Dan Paladin's signature flash style, and a soundtrack supplied solely by various music-makers on Newgrounds, Castle Crashers feels not too different to play than a flashgame you could find on Fulp's site; and for the cult fans of Fulp that's a good thing, since that's the style that they probably love about Behemoth; but considering this, remember you can play any Newgrounds game for free, and yet you have to pay a hefty $15 to play Castle Crashers.
If you like the gameplay, you'll probably say it's worth the price, since there is a steady stream in how Castle Crashers showcases its variety of enemies, bosses, level settings, and humor throughout each of the levels in the campaign to keep you addicted until you've played it all the way through. In short, Castle Crashers is functional; with the exception of a few peeves:
The 2D animation becomes a flaw considering the traditional usage of 3D level depth in combat-- enemies will appear to be right in front of you, so you attack, but then you would miss since the game registers the position of the enemy and your character to be beside your swing rather than in front of it. Bigger characters that are prevalent in the game (like the many huge bosses) will also frequently hide your character mid-fight as they walk around the level plane in front of you (and sometimes this even happens with enemies the same size as you if they are close enough). So it's likely a pretty big portion of your time playing Castle Crashers will be spent wondering where the hell you are.
Outside of the campaign there are several trivial minigames only dedicated players and fans of Fulp will acclaim or endorse.
As much as I want to like a game with such stylistic art, playful tone, and entertaining black humor, I still find the gameplay itself rather tedious. None of the loud and loyal Castle Crashers fans would truly like the game as much as they do if it weren't Tom Fulp or drawn in a less flashy and appealing art style. Replace the backgrounds and characters with some simpler animation and suddenly you have yet another generic beat-em-up game with a sense of humor that's only half-redemptive.

A fun beat em up that was unfortunatly balanced with coop in mind. Playing single player is nowere as fun, in particularl when it comes to the tough boss fights.

The comedic and gorey visual style are the best thing it can offer. The actual gameplay is quite simplistic, its just beat em up button mashing fun. Nice variety of levels, as well as the ability to upgrade your weapons make the progression more enjoyable.

A solid game, but hard to recommend if you have noone to play it with.