The Lion's Den - castle crashers

Do You Remember Castle Crashers?

By Daniel Robert Stahl, Editor-in-Chief

November 28th, 2023

Castle Crashers, a 2D side-scroller, hack-and-slash game, was first released for Xbox 360 by The Behemoth on August 27th, 2008. First brought into development in 2005, it was announced to arrive on the Xbox Live Arcade during Comic-Con 2006. Castle Crashers Remastered, a refined version of the beloved game, released on September 9th, 2015 on the Xbox One. Sadly, The Behemoth confirmed Castle Crashers 2 is never to come.

In my opinion, Castle Crashers is one of the best games to ever come out on the Xbox. This game holds a special place in my childhood as I would spend a lot of time beating the game many times over. Ever since rediscovering this game a few years back, I've been finding myself returning to play multiple times, even though I'm older and wiser. It’s the 2D aspect and cartoonish, funny style that I love from this game so much. While some of the humor can be considered childish, it's not just potty humor, it has so much charm for all age groups. I was also able to experience the game in its prime with friends, and we'd find ourselves playing for hours because of the multiplayer features. This isn’t all to my nostalgia either, and the art style of The Behemoth video game company is debatably the most iconic in any game.

Luckily, there are other options to play if YOU get bored of the main storyline. This includes the new games introduced by the remastered version. Besides the main storyline, the possible game modes you could play consisted of ALL YOU CAN QUAFF, BACK OFF BARBARIAN, and ARENA. Another motive for playing the game after finishing is unlocking the many characters. When you beat the game, you unlock a new character, and so I would beat the game to get as many characters as I could. During the quest to get these characters, it would take me to the other games made by The Behemoth. Games that were created by the company include Alien Hominid, November 21, 2004; Alien Hominid: PDA Games, December 8, 2011; BattleBlock Theater, April 3, 2013; Pit People, March 2, 2018; and Alien Hominid Invasion, November 1, 2023. In Castle Crashers, you're able to play as two characters that have connections to The Behemoth's other games, Alien and Hatty Hattington. The first character, Alien, appeared in the Alien Hominid series. Hatty in his dedicated game, Battleblock Theater, was a character that went through a friend-turned-foe trope. Their interconnecting series, formed throughout the company's lifetime, manifests a charming style to the games.

Despite how much I praise Castle Crashers, that does not discourage me from discussing the weaknesses that come with its gameplay. It's repetitive. The problem with the storytelling is it can only go so far, and considering the fact there is a beginning and end, the replay value of the game drops. Between the story and the hack-and-slash nature, it's formulaic and short. In my own experience, I personally never came across fatigue when playing the game with friends, however objectively, I can understand that the game is limited and struggles with new content. With the release of Castle Crashers Remastered, the new content that came was the last of any new updates to the iconic game series, halting its relevancy for years to come. So to bring back some of its spark, I wrote an article to talk about my exciting childhood.