Action · 2012 · The Behemoth · local · online
Castle Crashers
Four knights punch their way across the kingdom to rescue princesses. That is all the plot anybody needs.
What it is about
Four knights set out to bring back kidnapped princesses. That is the entire plot, and it is told without a single word — but with hand-drawn pictures that are silly throughout.
You play left to right: hit things, dodge, smash barrels, eat sandwiches. In between you spend experience points, find weapons and unlock animals that follow you around and grant small advantages.
Two people on one screen is where it belongs. You can revive each other, but also snatch the food from under the other's nose — and at the end of each stage a brief contest decides who gets the princess.
Our verdict for couples
Four knights, one kingdom and essentially one button for everything. You understand it in thirty seconds, a stretch takes ten minutes, and if you stop after two hours you have left nothing hanging — it does not demand a whole evening, it takes whatever evening it gets. Fifteen years on, that still makes it one of the most reliable answers to the question of what you actually want to play right now. There is practically no story, and for once that is not a shortcoming but the reason you can simply switch it on.
Pros
- Instantly understandable, no practice needed
- A stage takes ten minutes
- Plenty of characters and pets to unlock
Cons
- The perspective makes hits hard to judge
- Repetitive if you want to unlock everything
- There is practically no story
Suitable from
Casual–Hobby
- Conflict potential
- Spirited
- Cosiness
- Mixed
- When you can stop
- After 15 minutes
- How long it lasts
- 5–15 hours
What other co-op fans say
What the community writes is largely memory: a great many write about nights played through on the Xbox 360, about cousins, siblings and classmates, and about how the game feels unchanged when they come back to it. What gets praised is the art style, the unlocking of characters and the fact that it runs on anything. The objections are small and recurring: the hard-to-judge sense of depth and the point at which the unlocking turns into a chore.
- “Castle Crashers has got to be one of my favourite games of all time.”
- “alot of customization for skins, different loadouts for combat, great difficulty, easy modding and endless gameplay”
- “my only problems about the game is the depth perception cuz i always think i lined my self perfectly but i was slightly off”
Summarised by machine from 60 Steam reviews, not written by our editors. The quotes appear verbatim in those reviews.
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