Crush the Castle Legacy Collection

In the beginning there was word and the word was Scorched Earth. It’s not the first artillery game but it was the one that got extremely popular. Over the years more and more artillery games were coming out, but none achieved the same status until Crush the Castle. While it is based on Castle Clout, you can launch that game and instantly see why this licensed version saw greater success. Only when Angry Birds ripped it off and added pay 2 win monetization Crush the Castle was dethroned.

Crush the Castle was really popular back then. And it had the level editor that generated codes you could share. People were spending hours trying to crush each other’s giant bunkers or meat shield piles.

Crush the Castle

The first game is nearly perfect. The kinaesthetics are great, the level-design is good, it is short. Whatever flaws it has you will not find them without having additional non-diegetic context. The art is good and the fragile people in the castles are funny.

Crush the Castle: Players Pack

It is a pack of player’s creations. But also the core gameplay was tweaked. That and the selection criteria are dubious in my opinion. This is where the IP started to get derailed. With the addition of gold medals it went from crushing the castles, to designing the levels around RNG hole in one paradigm. Instead of fun and destruction you need to solve puzzles, and then retry the execution hundreds of times due to randomness.

Wooden Fortress is bugged in this version, it collapses into itself and becomes unbeatable. But then i got distracted and it killed itself in 0 shots.

Wait there are super bombs if you beat the game? I beat the whole thing with the standard set, often under par. I wasted a ton of time on some of the levels, when i could just annihilate them?

Crush the Castle 2

The sequel made the blocks breakable and they added many new projectiles. But at the same time they kept the hole in one design paradigm from the players pack. Breakable blocks don’t matter, when you have only one shot. And well, the levels are very puzzly. Many outright feature unbreakable constructions.

Now the doods just explode without leaving corpses. When the bodies were killing the living it was goofy, but i declare that a feature, which was removed. Also the doods became too resilient. They can survive being squished by tons of steel.

Not as good as it could be with better level design, but still solid.

Crush the Castle 2: Players Pack

And well, selecting submissions for the expansion they doubled down on hole in one puzzles. And some of these castles are extremely RNG. Especially that castle with a princess. You solve the puzzle by just looking at it, but then spend a hundred of tries to execute it, and out of 5 perfect executions it triggers only once. The dudes are too resilient to damage. And this level was as broken the first time.

But at least in the expansion you has access to the variety of projectiles. You can solve the levels your own way by using wrong projectiles and you can experiment with different things.

Crush the Castle: Adventures

This is like they saw the profits of Angry Birds and made their own pathetic attempt at replicating its art-style. The first two games already had good art. Replacing it with bad cartoons and cringe unfunny writing was not a good decision. The comedy of the first games was that there were no jokes.

Once again this is not crashing castle but solving a puzzle. This time the blocks actually break from most of the shots, and to achieve the goals you have to break a lot of them. But this game runs at a 3 stars meta with different tasks, so it feels even more like a puzzle.

The physics are as wrong as before, or worse. No, definitely worse. First of all the trebuchet is the most unsatisfying between Clout, 1, 2, and birds. It has a very weird ark. And it runs at a very limited number of trajectories. It switches between them so fats that if you let it go at the same point it will result in three different arks. You need superhuman reflexes to have any control over this game. And i am still not convinced it isn’t randomized. Considering that there are skip level infinite spells, i suspect it was a mobile pay 2 win release at some point. Which means screwing your customers = profits.

Then many of the levels outright have parts that are pinned to the air. And i’m not talking about indestructible puzzle pieces. Every throw leaves an interrupted line showing the trajectory, but it is extremely off and the whole game is parallaxing like hell making it even more useless.

Once the levels start to get harder you be just smashing that retry button before the first shot even left the trebuchet, because you already see that it’s all wrong. And each time you press retry you have to spam next to skip the stupid pop-ups. On several time-sensitive levels you can already lose by not launching the first shot instantly.

High Praise is pure RNG. Absolutely terrible level. Heavy Metal is an annoying puzzle that you’ve already solved, but it is hard to execute with buggy physics. Observatory often just hangs if you win. The last level is another RNG annoyance.

And then the additional missions are extra less fun. You either do it or not, retry, retry, retry. The last mission is just taking a piss with spinners. Second for Last has two (!) spinners. You need to do 1 in 100+ (!) shots, four (!) times in a row! And then repeat that again, for the other star! And one of those shots itself has randomized outcomes. In a game where every shot has 3 random outcomes by itself! Can you even imagine this insanity? To get the king first you need a perfect shot that only slightly brushes the spinner. If you miss the spinner you lost, not just the challenge but the level. The worst part, with unachievable luck it is possible to do this level in 3 shots. The grave from level 2 can drop down and kill the dood on level 3.

The breakable blocks are good. The new art, new writing, and this level design are bad.