Castle Crashers - The Behemoth

What an interesting take on the side-scrolling fighting game. You play one of a group of knights who have to fight through hordes of enemies to save the princess.

The level-up system allows you to increase whatever skills you would like, from strength and agility to magic. All of the knights can do similar things, and the ability to diversify your skills is what will make you operate differently from the others.

We found that a diverse party did best. We had a serious damage output who was also super tanky. 

We had a high-agility knight who was excellent at keeping us in the fight. We also had a mage good at long-range damage and freezing enemies.

The magic appeared to be the main way that the knights differed based on their colour. The ice knight and the freeze ability were excellent for the hordes you face towards the end of the game, but we didn't level up the other magic, so we cannot give you commentary on theirs.

The gameplay was fun, incorporating some slight combos in the fighting to allow you to do some really brutal moves on the enemies. 

The laning that is always important in this sort of game was here as well. You had to position yourself vertically on the screen to ensure you would hit or not be hit.

I don't recall any levelling in any other games like this, but it was probably there; I just haven't played any in a long, long while.

Other things you could do include collecting pets that would aid you in various ways. The different items and weapons you could choose had slight variance in gameplay and skill impacts.

For example, the spade allowed you to dig for treasure, and one of the animals scouted for where the treasure was buried. The boss variety was pretty good.

The end of the game was really hard because you couldn't really see what was happening. 

This was really disappointing because it had nothing to do with gameplay. Another neat feature was that after you finished a castle and rescued the princess, you would fight amoungst yourselves for her hand.