After playing the game three times at PAX and despite playing it at TGS last year, I had a different view.

While Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers borrowed heavily from other games, Battleblock is a foray into new gameplay.  The game is still 2D and retains Dan Paladin's trademark, crazy-ass-awesome "Flash" art. The PAX demo was a 2 on 2 tournament with three time-limited rounds of different gameplay: Kind of the Hill, Whale and Soul Stealer (working titles). Each level was small and kept the gameplay focused without much wandering around. Also, the game started with customizing your character's head and weapon selection such as grenades, mines and boomerangs.

King of the hill was a frantic fight to stay on gold blocks above a pit of lava. Fending foes off wasn't so easy as there was a teleport on either side of the level and respawning happens quickly.

Whale has a flying golden whale, something you can only wonder how the developers came up but maybe after a Moby Dick book club bender. Points are earned for collecting gold bricks that the whale drops and then bringing them to a flying safe that's wandering aimlessly elsewhere in the level.  The action become intense as four players get in close quarters and start fighting for gold until someone throws a grenade, kills everyone and all the gold is dropped. This level was larger so an arrow would fade in to point to the whale or safe if they were offscreen.

The soul stealing mode is all about killing your foes, snatching their floating soul and then holding onto it as long as possible for points. Once you have another soul, you'll drop that too if someone kills you. Sparkling dust will indicate that you have more than one soul, making you enticing prey. At the end of the each round, the score is tallied and an MVP is named. The same goes for the end of the tournament.

A couple of gameplay quirks to be aware of is that there  is a double jump that will saved my life more than once and that character's heads all have the consistency of a goomba's.  After I realized that dropping on someone's head from one block up (a game block, not a city block) would kill them, deaths seemed far less random and the game felt more fair.  Dropping on someone's head felt like the most effective way to dispatch someone over weapons and melee attacks.

Overall, I'm now looking forward to playing this co-op and to all the crazy crap that will undoubtedly end up in the game. Battleblock Theater is currently slated to come out later in 2010 on XBLA but no release date is confirmed yet; After all, The Behemoth is an indy developer and did just release Castle Crashers on PSN at the end of August.