"Brave Knights that will Kill You with Cuteness. And Fire and Ice and Lightening and Poison."
by Lisa Foiles

Everyone wants to be a knight in shining armor who scours the land in search of some princess in distress, except for those who want to be the princess, and except for those who are eternally damned to be the village idiot due to their innate stupidity apparent when they try to get their fat ass into their tiny Neon and ding my passenger-side car door. (…) What was I talking about? Oh, right, Castle Crashers.

Castle Crashers was created by the same flash animator guys at The Behemoth who created Alien Hominid for the GameCube – a statement that means nothing to you if you never played Alien Hominid. Well, it was awesome and that’s all you need to know. Castle Crashers comes to Xbox 360 owners as a downloadable game through Xbox Live Arcade. It’s a side-scrolling, kick-everything-around-you-in-the-nuts kind of game, with a few RPG elements.

You begin as a red, blue, orange, or…purple…knight. Wait, no. That’s the Ninja Turtles. Take two: You begin as a red, blue, orange, or green knight (you choose) with each color representing a different power (blue is ice, red is lightening, green is poison, and orange is fire). There are a butt-ton of other unlockable characters, but we don’t care about them right meow.

There are little to no voice-overs, just lots of cheerful, triumphant music and unique sound effects for the different characters – my favorite of which happens to be some forest-dwelling animals who propel themselves around by spewing diarrhea (but the game isn’t crude, I swear). The main-ish goal, like many RPG’s, is to level-up your character so you can destroy bosses with a wink and a wave as opposed to bashing their knees with your sword upwards of sixty times. In each level that you fight your way through in hopes of getting a smooch by a princess, there are goodies to find, weapons to pick up, and happy little helper creatures to adopt as your own.

Each little helper animal has a special helping ability from which you benefit, depending on which animal you select to tag along with you. For example, selecting the giraffe to follow you around allows you to level up more quickly. I wish every day that my cat that follows me around could provide me with special abilities instead of special spots of pee on my bathroom rug.
Castle Crashers is just a winner. It’s fun, fast-paced, amusing, and easy to pick up. If you download no other game from the Xbox Live Arcade, give this one a chance. I mean…it has animals that get around via diarrhea propulsion. And if diarrhea propulsion is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

Overall Rating: 8.5 out of 10