Castle Crashers -- All In One.

As we're in the calm before the storm I've been lazily drifting between a few titles. There are the nightly sessions of Phantasy Star Universe going on more for the conversation and checking in with friends than the game itself at this point. We're just awaiting the end game there, and that final achievement before putting Phantasy Star Universe to bed. I'm still firing up Too Human to do a run or three for the remaining pieces of the seven part epic armor set, and that final achievement associated with it. And we've also been spending time with Castle Crashers, the latest effort from The Behemoth, makers of Alien Hominid. The Behemoth sprung up out of Newsgrounds, an online community of homebrew game creators working with Flash. The Behemoth managed to get a real game to market with Alien Hominid. It was later ported to Xbox Live Arcade. Alien Hominid was a visually impressive 2D beat 'em up that catered too much to the egos of the most core gamers. In other words, it was stupidly way too hard to be any damn fun. Castle Crashers is another extremely visually impressive 2D beat 'em up born of Flash and released on Xbox Live Arcade. Did they learn their lesson with Alien Hominid? It seems they actually did. Will wonders never cease? Castle Crashers is actually fun. However it's not a flawless experience. The biggest complaint is probably the worst offense common to the 2D beat 'em up genre, and that's having a tough time lining up on the correct plane to engage the enemy. Castle Crashers is exceedingly sensitive about it. Even though you're standing right next to something with your weapon animating through said object you're not connecting and you'll find yourself having to continually adjust your positioning. Another issue I have with the game is in its experience system. Leveling up in a beat 'em up is not exactly new. It's been around since River City Ransom. Doing this online is rather new. So the question of how to handle this comes into play. I'm not sure the system they've employed works best. It's to each his own, and that might sound fair in theory, but button mashing wins the day in practice. A shared team experience would have been better suited for online in my opinion. Those two complaints aren't enough to truly dampen everything else Castle Crashers has to offer. It has a gorgeous visual style, exceptionally well done music, an offbeat and lowbrow sense of humor, and a decent character building aspect, in a rather sizeable main quest bolstered by an urge to collect every last weapon and animal helper. As of this entry, the game is plagued by a mess of connection issues that The Behemoth and Microsoft are aware of and currently working to fix via patch. Once that's been applied, it should be smooth sailing. Castle Crashers is a major improvement over Alien Hominid. I'm interested to see what they do next and hopefully whatever it may be is a further step in the right direction. I'm giving Castle Crashers an 8.