Four years ago, a few people over at Newgrounds teamed up to bring the beat ‘em up genre back into relevance with a game called Castle Crashers. At the time, the game was only available on the Xbox 360 through its online portal Xbox Live Arcade. The game was a tremendous success, both critically and financially. Much time has passed since then and the game developer, The Behemoth, has finally listened to the fans and announced that it will be bringing the game to the PC through Valve’s digital distribution service, Steam.
In a forum post, the developers explain, “We were invited by Valve to show Castle Crashers running on Steam at Gamescom. This is our first time at the event, and we’re sending our very own John Baez to the show all by himself!†While the original announcement was made on The Behemoth’s developer blog here, a high amount of traffic seems to have brought the blog down. While the site goes back up, more information on the PC port of Castle Crashers can be found in a forum post.
Here are some of the features of the Steam version of Castle Crashers according to the developers:
Integrated voice chat
Steam Achievements
Gamepad support
Steam Cloud Support
Local and Online Multiplayer
Colourful hand drawn 2D visuals!
Over 30 levels plus five arena modes
More than 25 characters and over 40 weapons!
Intuitive combo and magic system: Unlock an arsenal of new attacks as your character progresses through the game.
Experience system: Level up your character and adjust Strength, Magic, Defense and Agility.
Animal orbs: These adorable little companions each add different abilities to aid you on your journey
Arena mode: Battle other players in free-for-all or team matches with four unique modes to choose from!
Insane Mode: Test your skills in the ultimate campaign challenge.
Right from the time you begin this game, you know it's gonna be a fun ride. Castle Crashers is completely done in 2D with hand-drawn sprites, which gives it that old-school feel. It gives you an option to start the game using four-player multiplayer right from the beginning, which is an early indication that you're not really meant to play this game alone.
The gameplay is completely action-based, dividing your moves into fast attack, strong attack, jump, using items and magic. There's no puzzle solving here to slow down the pace. As long as you're in the level, you're fighting.
The Behemoth has also listed the hardware requirements for the PC version of the game:
OS: Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8
Processor: Dual Core Processor 2GHz+
Memory: 1GB
Hard Disk Space: 300MB
Video Card: Graphics: 256MB dedicated directx 9.0c compatible card
Sound: DirectX 9.0 compatible sound card
The Behemoth has not announced a release date for the game as of yet, but there might be more information coming up during Gamescom or PAX later this year.
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