Available on: Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Apple Arcade
Played on: Switch
The Apple Arcade exclusive and spinoff to Crossy Road, Crossy Road Castle has finally arrived on consoles, and it’s quickly become one of our favorite couch co-op family games.
Read on for our review of Crossy Road Castle!
Roguelike Chicken
In Crossy Road Castle, up to four players run and jump through dozens of short, pixelated, 2D randomized levels and boss battles. The goal is to make it as far as possible before the limited set of lives run out, using literally just a joystick and a jump button (and an emoji button, which is critically important in co-op!).
Crossy Road Castle features over ten endless towers with different themes and challenges. The Construction Tower includes exploding platforms, falling cars, and conveyor belts. While the Creepy Carnival does fun things with lights, ghosts, and musical buttons.
Successful runs can take over an hour, though individual levels rarely last more than 30 seconds.
The rapid-fire level designs are brilliantly simple yet effective. One room is nothing more than jumping on a single moving platform, with solid ground underneath, and zero danger. Another is a terrifying ascent up a series of dissolving platforms with swinging spiked balls.
The difficulty swings wildly from one random level to the next, but never gets too punishing. Every ten levels, players can use coins to restore health.
Repeating the same levels over and over never becomes much of an issue thanks to their randomized order, and the sheer amount of content between all the towers ensures you don’t have to stick around in one for too long. That said, the boss battles repeat as slightly different variations every 30 levels in each castle, and do get a bit too repetitive, and sometimes quite frustrating!
After a run, players can spend their hard-earned coins on unlocking fun new meme-inspired characters and hats, earning sticker achievements, and discovering hidden secrets. For such a relatively simple game, there are easily dozens of hours of unlockable content — not to mention future seasonal events.
Crossy Together
Playing single player is perfectly serviceable, and features its own set of leaderboard-based rotating challenges. But this game truly shines in chaotic co-op — especially local couch co-op. It’s the same party game vibe of a Mario Party, but purely cooperative, and easier to play.
The drop-in/drop-out local co-op is easy to setup, adding kids who pop in, or removing them when they tire and want out in the middle of a run (when the going gets tough, my preschooler prefers to sit it out!). The camera dynamically pulls out if players get separated, keeping everyone on the same screen.
Online co-op is also painless, with fun little lobby waiting rooms, and the ability to jump into anyone’s online game through Quickplay.
Playing co-op also makes things both easier and more difficult: if even one player survives to the exit, the team doesn’t lose any lives. However, many rooms are a lot more challenging when a player pushes a button when the others aren’t prepared for the consequences!
The Rating
Crossy Road Castle is rated E for Everyone, with Comic Mischief and Mild Fantasy Violence. Like Mario, players can jump on enemies to defeat them. Players are defeated in a single hit from spikes or enemies, accompanied by a fart noise, and disappearing.
The Takeaway
Surprisingly, this year’s dark horse pick (unihorse pick?) for our favorite family game is a 2D roguelike arcade platformer. Crossy Road Castle is a joyful triumph on consoles, with hours of easy-to-play platforming goodness that’s fun for the whole family.
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