'Crash'-tastic

You + Castle Crashers + 3 Friends == Epic Fun.

Play the game, you'll understand.

Video games are often a solitary pass time. The concept of the "singleplayer" experience is meant to sacrifice the unpredictability of other human players for the immersion of completely controlled story sequences. I am a huge fan of singleplayer games. Some times all I want to do is spend the evening alone, away from the ten year-old Satan-tongued Call of Duty players on Xbox Live. Playing games like Braid or Bioshock can make you forget your console ever needed more than one controller. And then Behemoth released Castle Crashers.

You can call it a limitation, but I call it a selling point. Castle Crasher's, a flash based cartoon button masher from the creators of Alien Hominid, was designed to bring gamers together around the same screen to experience one of the funniest, most visually and socially rewarding games available on Xbox Live Arcade. Find your three best buds, get a six pack of suds, and sit down for raucous evening of sore thumbs, poop jokes, and bosses that never die once.

It's easy to point first to Castle Crasher's stunning visual style as its highest point. Behemoth blends the classic side scrolling arcade basher with a unique, colorful, and often hilarious cartoon animation style. The playable characters don't feel as if they were pasted into a beautiful environment. Instead they move and animate fluidly as the interact with bizzare baddies and storybook quallity environments.

However, the animation, while the most obvious highlight, is not the game's strongest attractor. The method to the madness that is the game's team oriented gameplay is what truly sets "Crashers" apart from it's distant TMNT and Simpons relatives. In many side scrolling hack'n'slahses, the addition of more players simply means bowstaffs and nunchucks added to the brawl. Castle Crashers can be played that way, but it provides several reasons to keep aware of you fellow baddie bashing brethren. 

First off, when a player dies, he can be revived by any of his teammates by providing battlefield CPR to resusistate the fallen comrade. This means during particularly tough boss battles, magic casting and hammer smashing will be joined by rapid chest compressions to keep the team alive and kicking against the giant evil ear of corn. As my friends and I played, we called out on each for assistance, sometimes chosing to help, and sometimes choosing to ignore each other's plight in order to smack a giant sock puppet once more, much to the cursing chagrin of the man down.

The game is also well balanced to force players to work as a team to fend of foes. While the effectiveness of the team may vary by group, my friends and I would often trade off fire icicles and elecric bolts from afar while maces and slabs of meat smacked enemy hordes from close up. The game also spins teamwork on its head by pitting former friends against each other upon rescuing a princess, allowing the troupe to fight to the death for the honor of kissing the rescued damsel. The game is designed to work with any number of players, but it just seems to work so well as an excuse to gather friends around a common glowing LCD screen. The humor, which is often base and crude, seems infinitely more hilarous when shared with friends.

So is there any fault with Castle Crashers? Of course there is. The visual style, while utterly delightful, tends to put too many animations too close together. Several times I felt like game had degenerated to twisted, beat-em-up version of Where's Waldo. Also, some of the levels seem unnecessarily unfair and any attempt at judging depth in environment resulted in our arrows flying harmlessly past their intended target. But these difficulties are made up for in droves by the game's unrelenting charm, replayable unlocks, and team focused tactics. This is game is the reason to clean up your living room and invite the gang over.  It's an experience that demands four controllers and a free evening, that is at least until Little Big Planet arrives.

The princess is in another castle? No problem. I've got friends, and they brought sandwiches.