Have Fun Storming the Castle

A well-traveled gamer might observe CastleStorm's hodge-podge of numerous mechanics and inspirations, and suspect that much of the game is undercooked. This suspicion would be pretty accurate. But to end the story there would be a disservice to what the game does right.

CastleStorm is primarily a 2D, side-scrolling real-time strategy game with three interwoven threads of gameplay. One is a Swords & Soldiers-style marching war, where units spawned by the player march up against units spawned by the enemy -- with different unit types having different strengths and weaknesses. Archers can deal considerable damage but are easy to dispatch, paladins are strong but slow, et cetera. The goal of these troops is to march into the enemy's castle, steal their flag, and take it back to the player's castle.

These units can't be controlled directly once they're spawned; but another thread to the game is temporarily spawning and controlling the "hero unit," a super-strong leader who can move and sword-swing and arrow-shoot on-demand. While the hero unit can't pick up the enemy flag, he can handily clear the way for ground troops.

The third gameplay thread - frankly, the interesting one - is siege weaponry. From the invincible turret at the front of the player's castle, various projectiles can be aimed either at enemy troops or at the enemy castle. Castle damage can cripple the enemy by destroying unit-producing facilities, or the game can be won by obliterating the enemy castle altogether.

So, castle destruction is clearly an awesome thing. And when it works, it works well. But CastleStorm trips over itself a few times on the way to delivering this fine, castle-exploding experience.

Inbetween levels of the campaign, units and weapons can be upgraded (using money-points earned in the levels themselves). There are too many things to upgrade, and the game occasionally - especially in earlier levels - restricts the use of troops, or the hero, or the turret; resulting in many hard-earned upgrades going to waste. As the campaign proceeds, more troop and weapon types are unlocked, making some upgraded units obsolete. But there's no way to recover the money that's already been spent on old units.

Another between-levels activity is building the castle, which could have been a quaint nicety but instead feels like a boondoggle of a feature. Castle customization is unavoidable -- unit spawners, and gameplay bonus rooms, must be placed in the castle in order to have any effect. But the UI for selecting and placing rooms is an irritating mess. Moving rooms is the worst, since it is likely to require deleting other rooms in order to make space, only to re-create them in some new arrangement.

It's disappointing that the full-blown castle designer is required at all, since there are really only two requirements for any given castle:

• To include the rooms needed for selected units and bonuses;
• And to shield them from siege attacks by placing other rooms in front.

The option for cosmetic castle arrangement is ... neat, I guess, but using it to add a new room to a standard castle design feels like loading up Microsoft Office just to type a sentence.

And there are enough other miscellaneous aggravations about the gameplay - friendly fire damage from the turret, wonky camera zoom behavior, being unable to launch new attacks while waiting for a bomb to explode - that it's hard to be satisfied overall with CastleStorm. From concept to execution, much of the game is simply lacking in release-quality polish.

And yet! CastleStorm ultimately succeeds in being more than just the sum of its parts, thanks somewhat to the smart design of its campaign levels. Level objectives are mixed up with a healthy amount of variety, and most levels are short enough to keep the sequence of unlocking and upgrading moving along at a brisk pace. There is even a bit of humor in the campaign's storytelling, although the narrative is just barely deep enough to explain why two castles are fighting each other.

That's why, despite my misgivings toward CastleStorm, my "hey let's try this out" first sitting with the game turned into a 3+ hour journey through the entire main campaign. CastleStorm nails the addictive qualities it needs to keep going, regardless of its other annoyances.

That having been said, I don't think I will be coming back to it for the additional campaigns. At this point I feel like I have wrung all I am likely to enjoy (and then some) out of CastleStorm.

Better than: Swords & Soldiers
Not as good as: Kingdom Rush
Would seriously have enjoyed it much more: If castle room placement was replaced with a list of checkboxes.

Progress: Completed the first campaign on Normal.