CastleStorm is Angry Birds for those of us who like our projectile-based arcade games served not with cantankerous cardinals, but rather with enough braided Viking beards to put The Hobbit trilogy to shame. With startling dexterity, it cracks corny jokes while juggling elements of tower defense and real-time strategy, and enough depth exists beneath its seemingly casual aesthetic to endear it to hardened strategists. Were it not for some mildly annoying issues with its controls, CastleStorm (available on XBLA) would deliver an almost perfect storm of challenge and fun.
It's a tower defense game in the strictest meaning of the term: you occupy one of two towers and try to defend it from a guy who's trying to knock it down or, at the very least, use ground-based combat units to run off with its flag. It's how CastleStorm goes about this that makes it so enticing. First there's the entertaining Angry Birds-style ballista warfare, which sees you chucking everything from gassy sheep to Thor's hammer Mjolnir at the enemy's castle or ground units. In the battlefield between, upgradeable units ranging from humble archers and mounted knights to dragons and golems clash in a pleasingly frantic tug of war. And when things really go to hell, CastleStorm offers few better pleasures than the limited ability to hop into the action yourself as one of the narrative's Kingdom or Viking heroes.
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