Castle Crashers

Button-pounding hack-and-slash chivalry brings to mind the golden age of Golden Axe, but Castle Crashers isn’t so much a sidescrolling stroll down memory lane as an ornately wrapped present for retro enthusiasts. A quartet of color-coded knights on a quest to rescue kidnapped princesses might sound like a recipe for flavorless gruel, but any cook will tell you: presentation is everything.

From the hordes of lightsaber-wielding black knights that surround your squad to the bizarre screen-filling boss creatures that turn online co-op into an endlessly replayable shared hallucination, every inch of the hand-drawn kingdom is brimming with endearing eccentricity. What’s more, the same indecipherable logic that makes the story irrelevant imbues your journey with wild unpredictability. One moment you’re charging through an obstacle course on incontinent deer, the next you’re battling a catfish the size of a trawler. Gobble down a sandwich to bust out of your armor like a medieval Incredible Hulk, dig for buried treasures, and turn more than 20 unlockable characters from level 1 zeroes to upgraded war machines.

If anything, there’s perhaps too much going on at any given moment: between foreground objects that block your view for no good reason and the sheer chaos of four people bashing monsters, just finding your character on the screen can sometimes border on impossible. This is less of a problem on your own, but there you run into a wholly separate issue: poor difficulty balancing that leaves you to furiously and repetitively exploit patterns in enemy behavior just to survive the onslaught.

Whether you find the actual mechanics of combat as entrancing as the surreal visuals depends on your love (or tolerance) for the genre trappings of old-school brawlers. A variety of combination attacks and magical spells is just calling your name, and you can customize your knight with hidden and collectible weaponry and animal helpers.

But if the thought of grinding through endless waves of goons induces a yawn, even the vital social dynamics of four-player co-op and arena contests might prove insufficient. On the other hand, if you find yourself occasionally lamenting the bygone heyday of those arcade knuckle-dusters you played to death, you’ll love every crazed minute of Castle Crashers.