The CastleStorm war continues with ‘From Outcast to Savior’, featuring a new 20 battle campaign, new hero, new Royal Guard-class troops, new weapons, and new trophies! Lead your army into battle across stunning new environments including Stonecrest, The Royal Airport, The Skyship Harbor and the Bladgard Icefields in your quest to capture the belligerent and power-hungry Viking warrior, Chief Ramhorn.

CastleStorm: From Outcast to Savior – Launch Trailer

This is a double review for the PS3 and Vita versions for CastleStorm: From Outcast to Savior. The PS3 version was played by EdEN, and the Vita version was played by Ceidz. This review presents what they both had to say.

CastleStorm returns in “From Outcast to Savior”, the first of a series of DLC for the game. First of all, if you played the main game but didn’t manage to complete it, you will be pleased to know that the DLC packs are actually separate campaigns that aren’t locked if the main game is not completed! However, the difficulty for the new missions is balanced in a similar way to the last ones for the main campaign, so you might find the difficulty curve abrupt if you don’t really know how to play!

The missions themselves revolve around rescuing the princess of the kingdom (on multiple occasions!), and it introduces a new playable hero. Another cool thing is that there are still a lot of cut-scenes using the in-game engine, and the story is fun to experience. Finally, please note that the upgrade tree is reset at the start of the campaign so that you can have a fresh start with all the upgrades, and since this DLC is shorter than the main game (as was to be expected), I had even more fun upgrading my skills, weapons and troops! The gameplay is practically identical to the main game, so you will still be slashing bad guys with your hero, launchings hordes of soldiers, defending your castle and destroying the rival stronghold. The loading times issues we mentioned in the main game review are still there, but once the segment is loaded, we are free from loading until the next game section.

You know what I wanted right after I was done with Castlestorm? More Castlestorm! And that’s just what I got with From Outcast to Savior. This DLC pack presents a new campaign with a new hero, new weapons and skills, and a chance to upgrade each one of them according to your gameplay style.

As Ceidz said, the difficulty curve is something to consider. I played all of Castlestorm proper on Hard, but had to change to Normal in From Outcast to Savior for the first couple of sets of levels so that I could earn enough money to upgrade my troops, castle, hero and weapons in order to try and get 5 stars in every single level (which I’ve now done, even though a couple of levels demand perfect timing to succeed). Since all of the trophies in From Outcast to Savior are story related, except for the one for getting 5 stars in every level, you can enjoy the game at your own pace and worry about going back to levels once you’ve upgraded accordingly.

And you’ll definitely need to upgrade if you want to defeat the boss battles in the game on Hard! Nothing screams “prepare thy self” like having to battle a fire dragon, or going mano-a-mano against the main evil Viking in the game while being attacked by an onslaught of evil, lesser Vikings! ————————————-

From Outcast to Savior brings us more Castlestorm to play, and that is always a good thing. The difficulty spike for this DLC pack is something to consider because Casual feels like Normal, Normal plays like Hard, and Hard is brutal. At only $2.99, the new campaign is a nice complement to the main release, and something that Castlestorm fans will enjoy. *This game is Cross-buy (but not Cross-save) between the PlayStation 3 and the PS Vita.

[review pros=”More Castlestorm!
New challenges
Cross-buy” cons= “The loading times strike back” score=80]

Cost: $2.99

PSN game size: 110Mb

You can purchase CastleStorm and the DLC from the PSN.

Disclaimer

This review is based on two copies of CastleStorm: From Outcast to Savior DLC provided by Zen Studios.