As well, players have have access to a projectile attack, which can be swapped between a bow and a boomerang. Like many games of its ilk, Castle Crashers gives its protagonists a heavy melee attack and a light melee attack, which can also be combiend with a jump for a different effect. As four diminutive knights, each with a different magical alignment, players cooperatively kick the crap out of hundreds of enemies, punctuated by huge bosses-and then, at the end of each level, they kick the crap out of each other. Like its predecessor Alien Hominid, The Behemoth's Castle Crashers is a throwback to a video game genre that flourished in the late 80s and early 90s-in this case, the cooperative sidescrolling beat-em-up. "More on that later."Ĭontinue reading for my hands-on impressions of Castle Crashers. "We've got a lot of fun stuff going on, secret projects," promised Fulp. Of course, though The Behemoth keeps itself running fairly lean, there are further projects planned. Everyone has to do a lot, because you have limited resources, but you make up for it because everyone takes a lot more pride in what they do thanks to having more control over the final product." "You really want to stay small, unless you're planning on making the next big blockbuster. I asked Fulp about what it takes to keep everything running in today's increasingly competitive market. Right now we're really focused on Castle Crashers on XBLA, but we consider everything," he said.Īs a small independent studio, the company can't spread itself too thin.
That's not to say The Behemoth wouldn't look into distribution over PlayStation 3 or Wii's online services. Things have been great with Alien Hominid HD, so we've been really happy with it." Why Live Arcade rather than a competing service? Said Fulp, "It was a matter of just looking at the landscape and deciding that one was the right one for us. "Alien Hominid HD really kept us going, kept us busy," said Fulp, referring to the updated downloadable version of The Behemoth's well-received sidescrolling shooter Alien Hominid (PS2, Xbox, GCN, GBA). Xbox Live Arcade has proven to be a boon for the small company, which has spent longer than initially planned getting Castle Crashers out the door. It turned into something a little different, but with the same heart as the original." We know how many more enemies and special effects we can put on the screen. "Now we have all that horsepower, and that changed the scope of the game. "We didn't have any specific platform before it was just general development, getting it ready," Fulp went on. Knowing exactly what hardware to shoot for has allowed the team to properly fine-tune the game. "The original one had larger characters that didn't have as cool a style, and Dan thought he had a better way to draw them, so the whole game's aesthetic changed around that," said Fulp.Ĭrucially, Castle Crashers now has an official platform: Xbox Live Arcade on Xbox 360.
However, Fulp noted that much of the game has seen drastic improvements, including some to artist Dan Paladin's oft-noted sketch-like characters and environments. The game still plays very much like it did before, but feels smoother and certainly more stable. "Since we initially showed it two years ago, it kind of got rewritten from the ground up," Fulp explained. I caught up with The Behemoth co-founder Tom Fulp for a chat about how far the game has come in that time and how things are progressing at his studio. This year, Castle Crashers was back-and unlike as in its early, understandably bug-ridden state, it was not living up to its name and crashing left and right. The San Diego-based developer was, appropriately, showing its game at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con. When I last saw The Behemoth's four-player old-school cooperative brawler Castle Crashers, the game was being shown for the first time.