Castle Crashers brings us a great sense of humor, awesome art style, and fun gameplay that should not be missed.
The setting of Castle Crashers is charmingly simple. As one of four color-coded knights, you must fight barbarians, monsters, pirate ninjas, aliens, and a whole assortment of evil beasts and creatures to save the kidnapped princesses and reclaim a crystal stolen by an evil wizard.
Pretty standard stuff, but it's the presentation that makes it shine. The Behemoth Studios and Dan Paladin of Alien Hominid fame bring back their artistic talent to the game, creating a quirky and funny world for our brave heroes to explore, everywhere from a forest with a mysterious monster dwelling in it to a scorpion-infested desert. The characters are truly interesting and the things they will be doing are what will catch your attention. If you're not crashing a wedding or riding a self-defecating deer, you're playing volleyball in the desert or getting smashed by a castle full of traps.
The gameplay is simple, yet has enough complexity to keep it from getting old. You attack with the X and Y buttons, jump with A, and use items with B. If you hold the Left Trigger you can block and if you hold the Right Trigger in combination with your attack and jump buttons, you can perform spells based on your character. This is another area where the game really establishes itself, each of the four knights having their own unique spells. Red zapping with lightening, Blue freezing with ice, Orange burning with fire, and Green (which I'm partial to) intoxicating with poison. All the gameplay is nicely animated and with all the chaos going on, you certainly won't be getting bored anytime soon.
Music is another place that has its own merits. Sporting the music of famous artists from the famed Audio Portal of Newgrounds, Castle Crashers is decked out with epic orchestras, fast-paced techno, and a wide variety of catchy themes that you will certainly be looking for on Newgrounds after you've heard them. (to make your search easier, there's a thread in the Castle Crashers forum that has links to almost all the songs)
With 4 knights, multiplayer is pretty much guaranteed. You can play co-op locally or on Xbox Live or a combination of both so there's no limit to what you can do. Co-op gets very chaotic and if its a slight knock against the game, you'll find yourself getting VERY confused lots of the time if you're playing with 3 other knights, all blasting their magic in random directions and cutting the hell out of everything they see. Still, it's very fun. Castle Crashers also has a head-to-head multiplayer called Arena where you can 3 other knights can square off against each other in a variety of different modes.
Overall, Castle Crashers is an exceptional game. Only issues like online problems (it can be hard to find a decent match or co-op game) and saving file glitches (it has been reported that on extremely rare occasions, people have lost their entire save files) prevent the game from being a true masterpiece. However, despite these, if you're willing to spend 1200 MS points, you will find yourself with one of the most engaging and entertaining games that Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade has to offer.