How to Crash into Castle Crashers

This is a review of Castle Crashers.

First off Castle Crashers is a action arcade brawler, it's a 2d game that is 4 player co-op.

The Story starts out with a big thing taking a big gem and 4 princesses and you the four knights of the king adventure to return these princess and get the gem. The story is really just that there is almost no more story which they didn't include dialogue which has limited the amount and depth that can be told in the story which has created a simplistic story design, but that does in this case draw away from the game as it game play mechanics are enhance by everything else and the set up just helps to engage you into the world to drop you into the fast action fun gameplay that makes this game awesome.

The combat is quick fun and responsive, and still is complex enough to create challenge. The combat is set up in a simple action system you have heavy and light attacks and you earn xp and money, you spend skill points into attributes like strength and dexterity which all help with increase different aspects of these characters. These range of skill help to give complimentary combat that helps to create variation between each character in the game so when you are playing with friend it creates a co-competitive aspect which is heavily focused on at time in the game which brutally reminds you this.

The money helps to create a system of buffs and breaks in combat where you will buy potions that can help with healing or increase the mana of a character to cast more spells which all help the characters variations.

But where there is great variation in the characters it lacks in level design. For the most part the game moves linearly it will always move forward having minimal explorations you are pretty much running along a level and smashing enemies and trying to race to the end. This is fun but does have the glory of being replayable as much as I expected, but it would have been better to have more variation and more exploration that would draw the players away from the linear path, and compliment the co-competitive nature of the combat.

Although it is linear it still changes things after a while by adding in linear but more challenging levels in which the combat and movement is changed up but this was great at making the combat and mechanics incredible fun but still lacked the level design and interactions as the players still are running to the end.

But in saying this the game builds up to the best part of all of this which is the ends where you fight to the end and win the level but must fight out each other for the rewards which I will leave for you to find out. This was the greatest part of the game, which best sums up the game as a whole, its a game that is about working to get to the end but become better than your friends and this creates some of the best couch co-op experiences I have ever had with a 4 player couch co op game ever.

The game may lack in it level design and interacts being linear but the game focuses on the gameplay and the players co-competitive couch game that is fun and exciting.

To sum up the Game is great for a couch co op experience but to be a game for a singular player experience is not what this was developed for.

So I am giving it a 4/5, it's one of the best couch co-op experience I have played but it could have improve the story focus and added in less linear level design to help even more compliment the games co-op experience give the game even more value to the already valuable game.