At last fall's Penny Arcade Expo, the first game
that attendees caught on their way onto the show floor was the cartoonish
brawler Castle Crashers, advertised with
its titular colored knights frowning from the booth. And the team at The
Behemoth, led by programmer Tom Fulp and artist Dan Paladin, play well with the Penny Arcade crowd, thanks to
their appealing character design, retro side-scrolling action, light toilet
humor, and ramshackle "anything goes" aesthetic—where knights on a
medieval adventure can wind up playing volleyball in Arabia, or mowing down
aliens on a UFO.
Castle Crashers is
amusing, but limited. The campaign rambles through predictable
environments—here's the lava world, there's the ice—taking
tangents, like the UFO, that feel indulgently random. With only a handful of
combos and enemies who are remarkably similar except for their sprites and
their endurance, the fights don't offer much variety, and the boss fights
demand more patience than tactics. The few hours' of story are fun but never
thrilling, and while the light RPG elements give you the pleasure of leveling
up a cast of characters, only the diehards will take the journey a second time.