A Quick Look At Castle Crashers

Trying to find a common ground in video games is hard. There are so many games to play, but not everyone has them. And on top of that, not everyone is even on the same platform. This was a difficulty that I have found quite a lot while playing games with my boyfriend. But we did eventually stumble on one game we both owned: Castle Crashers.

Castle Crashers has been out for ages, but I never got around to playing it, because it’s a beat-them-up game. I’m not normally into that sort of thing, mostly because I suck at them. However, I had a good opportunity to play the game with my boyfriend, and there’s some neat stuff to write about.

So basically, Castle Crashers sticks you in a level, and you constantly make your way to the right, while defeating various enemies that spawn. Each screen, you have to clear out all the enemies before you can move on. Pretty simple. As you go, you pick up gold coins and various food items in order to heal up. At the end of each mission, you get to level yourself up.

Occasionally, you stumble across a boss and have to fight that. Or run away from a boss. Or run away from one boss then land in another boss fight.

However, we kinda got a bit stuck on one mini boss. There were just too many crappy enemies to get rid of, between the mini boss and us. Actually, a lot of the mini bosses took a long time to kill. Not just because they had high health, but they’d mostly keep on throwing normal enemies at us as well. There’s simply too much going on. I actually wouldn’t mind the tough bosses though, if there aren’t so many other enemies on the screen. With everything attacking at once, you get very little opportunity to actually attack the boss.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the normal enemies aren’t so tanky. It takes forever to actually kill anyone. So you find yourself slashing constantly at the common enemies that chip at your health when you should be focusing on the boss.

There are also different weapons available, and you can level up as you go along, but none of them seem to make that much difference. At least, compared to the default starter weapons. I ended up picking up a stick as a weapon and spent way too long using it, waiting for a better weapon to drop. At least you can go to the frog blacksmith and pick up a weapon you’ve unlocked.

There’s also a lot of shit jokes. As in, jokes about shit. The humour in Castle Crashers is very childish. It’s amusing, but definitely childish. On one section in particular, there were a lot of animals shitting themselves and running away from an unseen threat, the next boss. But I suppose crude humour does make a bit of a change. Goes nicely with the art style.

Honestly, the art style is lovely and I really like it. It’s very simple and cartoon-y, but it matches with the gameplay very well.

Overall, Castle Crashers is pretty fun but its difficulty is a tad annoying. Or maybe it’s because I don’t have a controller. Oh well.