Crossy Road Castle now available in Apple Arcade

Five months after announcing the game, Aussie developers Hipster Whale have released Crossy Road Castle into the Apple Arcade.

As is the case with all Apple Arcade titles, this is an exclusive game, it can’t be found on the open App Store, it won’t be found on another platform – you have to have your Apple Arcade subscription to get it.

But, that’s a good thing in many ways, particularly for parents, because a single Apple Arcade subscription means all the games downloaded from the Apple Arcade are free as part of your monthly subscription and there is a guarantee of no in-app purchases.

Crossy Road Castle is a new take on the endless hopper which took the world by storm and made a couple of blokes from regional Victoria very rich.

Instead of hopping across roads and rivers as is the case in Crossy Road, in Crossy Road Castle you are climbing levels in a tower. However, it’s not quite the upward journey you might thing.

It’s actually more of an old-school arcade approach to game completion. Level after level, different challenges to overcome, but the goal is to get from the in door to the out door and progress to the next level.

You get three lives, which can be lost by running into the enemy combatants, which look to me like little robots in the first game I played.

I scored what I think was a respectable 90 on my first go, but can see the addiction to giving it another red-hot go.

At a glance, and having only played it quickly, I think it’s not addictive on the same level as Crossy Road, in particular, because it does require a two thumbed approach to the controls. In fact, the game would be much better suited to playing with a game controller, which of course you can now link easily with iOS13.

And then there’s the multi-player aspect – linking multiple users via WiFi to compete together, that’s next-level stuff in a game like this.