CastleStorm Review

The lone awkward exception within the otherwise manageable control scheme is the ballista itself: it's difficult to handle because precision aiming in the heat of the moment is such a challenge. The D-pad enables tweaks once you're pointed in the general direction you want to fire, but you often have to hold a button to make any obvious changes, and then the trajectory might be radically altered for no apparent reason. In some cases, you can wind up wasting so much time fiddling with your aim that an enemy will sashay through a barrage of wild last-minute shots. Such unfortunate moments are infuriating, to say the least. They negatively impact an otherwise terrific experience.

The life of a hero is arduous but rewarding.

As you progress through the game's single-player modes, you regularly access new weapons and additional room types for your tower. Each new element can be permanently leveled up using experience points that you gain by completing story missions and side quests. If you find yourself stuck in a challenging stage, you can revisit earlier quests, essentially grinding the way you might if you were playing a role-playing game. There's also an editor that lets you customize your castle layout, if none of the available structures suit your tastes. That option had the potential to be quite cool, but you'll probably find that the default buildings work just fine and look more interesting.

On that note, the developers really did a great job of making sure that everything is attractive. Character models are vividly drawn and easy to tell apart, even when you have the perspective zoomed out for strategic purposes. There can be a lot of activity onscreen with no ill effects; two huge towers can crumble apart one piece at a time while volleys of arrows and shrapnel fly back and forth between them with nary a hitch. Audio provides excellent cues that complement the action nicely. For instance, your men yell for cover as you instruct them to duck enemy fire, and the sound of a tower finally crumbling to the ground is always a treat. Stirring musical selections play in the background, as well, keeping the presentation suitably epic from beginning to end.

They're not evil; they're just suffering from a bad case of pink-eye.

If the main campaign gets old, there are still reasons to keep playing. Survival mode lets you face the endless waves that you would expect from the genre, and in Skirmish mode, the first general to destroy a building or claim a flag is the winner. If you like to play with friends, you will be pleased to find that the game also offers those supplemental modes in multiplayer variants. You can play locally with a buddy on a horizontally split screen, or you can log on to Xbox Live and seek out strangers. Appropriately, any units that you may have strengthened while playing offline must start from scratch when you take them online, but you can gain experience points and make them stronger as you start racking up victories. The online options offered ensure that your competitive experience isn't limited to merely leaderboard rankings, as is all too often the case.

CastleStorm's well-executed twists to the tower defense genre make it a unique game with something to offer a variety of players. The occasional control issues are regrettable but hardly insurmountable, and the blend of offensive and defensive objectives and the competitive play are sufficient reasons to overlook that minor flaw as you happily commit yourself to the task of ruining the marauding Vikings' day.