When bad coding ruins a game
Castle Crashers is a side scrolling fighting game with cartoonish animations and a touch of baseless feces scrambled into the mix. To paraphrase my brother, it's a touch of ninja turtles, warcraft, and pokemon. The turtle reference is talking about the side scrolling combat and handling, warcraft alludes to genre, leveling, and some loot, and pokemon relates to the small sidekick animals you an collect.
It might sound somewhat blah, but it was really quite fun to play through with my brother. The action can be a bit hard to view, as some of the backgrounds get in the way, as well as the sheer number of enemies can cause you to lose sight of your toon. Those facts aside the combat was just interesting enough to keep us going through the game in a single sitting, which wasn't too terribly hard given the first play through ran around 6 hours for us. The desire to collect all the gear, pets, and unlockable character skins could certainly add to that time, not to mention just enjoying playing with people.
Which is where this game fell flat. Apparently, it's got an issue that makes playing with people online very difficult. We spent 2 1/2 hours trying to troubleshoot our routers before we fell upon the answer that it was actually the game that kept us from connecting. It seems you have to have at least 3 different consoles connected to start a game successfully, which really wasn't something I was interested in. We ended up playing at his place, and local co-op is no problem, still this is really unacceptable for a game that makes such a big deal of touting it's co-op play.
While I haven't really found the game that exciting solo, you can definately go that route. The game has some really fun and unique moments that I don't want to spoil. The leveling system gives you a mediocre degree of customization, and the unlockable skins are neat too. Getting them looks to be more difficult than I'd like, getting 1 each time you beat the game. Plus, you have to start the new skin off at level 1, so it's alot of grinding out, but the game is really made for that.
Overall, a good arcade title ruined by shoddy workmanship, and an apparent lack of desire to fix the issue.
pop corn
volleyball