For those who are still unfamiliar with it, the game’s title is pretty self-explanatory. The setting is some unspecified Medieval period and the King has ordered you to go forth and crush all resistance by… well, crushing castles.
Your weapon is a simple trebuchet, armed with a small rock to take out the rather flimsy castles. Seriously, the first few look like they could be taken out by a stiff breeze.
One of your first opponents prepares to repel your attack.
And fails miserably.
Don’t expect any serious resistance in your reign of terror. There are kings, queens, knights and guardsmen inside the castles, and all will simply cower in terror before your trebuchet and just hope you go away. The challenge comes from taking out the castle with the limited number of missiles you have, while making sure you don’t accidentally protect your victims by making the rubble fall into the way of any future shots. Levels are passed by killing everyone in sight. This can be done by hitting them square with a missile or simply making them fall over, which suggests that clumsy people don’t live that long in this world.
This place doesn’t look safe to live in, let alone survive an attack.
After only a short amount of play, you will start to get larger and more powerful missiles to take out the castles. You will need them, because whoever built the later castles realise that they’re supposed to be made to last. Hence you get structures built out of stone and metal, which your previous puny pebbles will simply bounce off of. They are also built to be stronger, so a little bit of thinking is needed to take out the last few castles.
I feel sorry for the guardsmen on the top, though.
Overall, there are several games out there that have their own take on this style of game but Crush The Castle was the first one of them that I was really aware of. It’s good, cathartic fun, if a little easy, and as mentioned above it has a level creation mode for people to build their own castles.
Check it out: Crush The Castle
Written by: Richard Wilson
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