You can use these things to help your army take out smaller troops or directly fire your ammo at the enemy’s castle. While your troops just go about doing their own thing, you are in direct control of a ballista that fires a wide variety of awesome weapons, including javelins, mind control potions, and gassy sheep. Your castle needs to be defended, true, but what about that big old ugly viking castle over across the map, sitting their all smug and making offensive gestures at your family members? Don’t you just want to smash it? Well, luckily in CastleStorm you can do just that. In most instances, however, this is not enough because this isn’t just a tower defense game as you are expected to play tower offense as well. You can spawn many different types of troops to help defend your castle and prevent your flag from being stolen by those no good dirty vikings. Still, while a Google search for tower defense games gives you only slightly fewer results than “Miley Cyrus sideboob”, the unique perspective CastleStorm offers prevents it from feeling like just another tower defense game. At the core of this concoction is essentially a tower defense game, a genre has become so over-saturated over the past few years that even if developers stopped making them now I still couldn’t possibly play through all of the bad ones floating around the dark depths of the Internet. However, somehow CastleStorm manages to meld all of this into one remarkable and coherent package, making the game feel like more than just a sum of its parts. This formula seems like it would lead to confusion, with disparate styles muddying the gameplay and imparting a lack of real focus. The core of the game is actually comprised of three completely unique game styles, mixing Angry Birds like destruction with tower defense and elements of a beat ’em up. There are a handful of laugh out loud moments, an d it is nice to find a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Sure, you have the prerequisite knights and ogres and dragons, but you’re also dealing with soldiers striking because they’re tired of being used as fodder and sheep who won’t stop eating your weapons. However, the lighthearted approach the game takes to the story telling gives CastleStorm a unique feel and makes the plot far more entertaining than if they had tried to approach it seriously. This is about as generic as a fantasy story can get and is essentially the equivalent of the stock photo that comes with a picture frame when you buy it. It falls to Sir Gareth to rally the troops, retrieve the gem, and restore peace to the land. As such, the peace inevitably goes sour when the knights’ magic gem of plot convenience gets stolen. The knights and vikings have had a longstanding peace, but being a protector of the realm during peace time in a game would make for a dull experience as the ribbon cutting and baby kissing minigames would get boring quickly. You assume the role of Sir Gareth, protector of the realm and three time defending champion of manliest beard.

The control options on the Wii U version make it feel like it should’ve been on this console all along, and if you’ve missed out until now, this would be an excellent time to make up for your mistakes. Regardless of what console it has appeared on, CastleStorm has always been a lot of fun (even if I don’t quite know what to call it). It is more of a “beat and destroy their castle by throwing sheep, but also defend your castle with swarms of soldiers ’em up” but typing that throughout the review was giving me hand cramps.

It does have elements of a beat ’em up, but that isn’t the main focus of the game and there are times where you can ignore those aspects entirely. I suppose the closest thing would be tower defense, but it does so many different and unique things that classifying it as a tower defense game doesn’t really accurately describe it. The Wii U marks the third console I’ve played through CastleStorm on now, and I’m still not any closer to figuring out what I should call this thing.

Defend your castle for wii