Flashbang: Crush the Castle

Admit it, on occasion you just have to blow things up. You can talk about art direction and narrative and interface design, but sometimes the need to throw something heavy and watch stuff crash is just overwhelming. Crush the Castle from Armor Games is just such a game.

You’re running a trebuchet and throwing rocks and bombs at “castles” filled with guards and nobles. Killing all of the guards and nobles completes a level, allowing you to move on to other castles to destroy other guards and nobles. Twenty four levels of castles later, you find that you have destroyed every other lord in the land and you are granted the right to build your own castle. The twenty four levels took me about twenty minutes, but I didn’t feel it was too short.

The controls are simple mouse clicks: one to start the trebuchet moving, another to release the stone or bomb. The controls take a few tosses to get a feel for and then it’s a simple matter of when you release the stones to hit different parts of the castles. Well, it’s not always simple, but the frustrations are spaced out and are overcome quickly.

The place where Crush the Castle fell short for me was in the last stage when you are building your own castle. The engine that you build the castle with is fun, and testing it is great, but that’s pretty much it. You can save your castle and could conceivably email your castle to your friends, but the story and any sense of continuity ends with the last crushed castle. A second level of quests involving the defense of your castle and attacking others would have really been interesting.

Crush the Castle is built by programmer Joeybetz and Chris Condon from Armor. It is “inspired” by Castle Clout from Liam Bowmers. What this really means is that it’s an updated version of the same game. The graphics and game play are greatly improved, but the update doesn’t really add anything new. There’s no bad here, though. For what it is, Crush the Castle is great. You blow things up, get better ammunition, and in the end you can go blow things up again.

I’d give Crush the Castle a 7.5. It’s fun for what it is, much like a Dolph Lundgren movie, but at the end of the day it’s not going to change your outlook on life or on gaming.