FairyTale Fights

PS3 review by Terence Gage, published on Saturday 28th November 2009

Fairy tales have been lying to us all. Popular myth and folklore would have us believe that Red Riding Hood or Sleeping Beauty were pure and innocent, when in fact FairyTale Fights proves they were murderous and borderline psychotic. It starts auspiciously; the Naked Emperor and Jack (of the Beanstalk variety), along with their friends above, are dismayed that their fame has diminished in favour of new flavour of the moment, Little Tailor, and go on a journey to kick some arse in the hope of regaining their status as fairy tale legends and heroes of the people.

What this roughly entails is multiple levels of hack-and-slash action which fall half way between the comical stance of Grabbed by the Ghoulies and the side-scrolling action of Sega classic Golden Axe, all wrapped in a healthy dose of satire straight from the Shrek school of design. The visuals and style are strong and distinct, boasting chunky characters and scenery, and it has a surprisingly nice line in physics, with dismembered corpses limply falling around once foes are dealt with. There’s a certain level of sadistic charm to seeing Sleeping Beauty beat her way through hordes of sinister axe men using a (surprisingly dangerous) rabbit as a club.

The combat system is simple but feels a little unsophisticated - it uses the right analogue stick to direct and initiate attacks, but lacks precision or finesse as a result. Combos can be performed by mixing up the timing, but they seem to offer relatively little variation so there’s not much incentive for doing so. It allows players to execute interesting-looking attacks, but at the same time is more than a little distancing from the action, and there’s nothing to the combat which couldn’t have been achieved with plain button presses. The variety of enemies is quite broad, covering a fair range of the standard fairy tale clichés, and there are occasional bosses including a giant beaver. It’s a shame though that the boss battles are really drawn out, far beyond being fun and into the realms of tedious. Avoiding attack patterns for a minute or two before being allowed a ten second attack window is not particularly enjoyable.

The game doesn’t have a standard lives system - instead you can keep coming back as long as there is a adequate score; each resurrection eats a little into that total. It’s a fair system which allows plenty of leeway for the gamer, and at times it’s ridiculously easy to die so it needs to be generous. Platforming sections don’t come out too well, with falls from barely discernible walkways prevalent and navigation of environmental hazards (such as massive circular buzzsaws) tricky due to the perspective and zoomed-out camera. The camera is generally sufficient for the combat, but can be very frustrating when it comes to the platforming sections.

You can play the game in up to four player co-op online or off, but unfortunately in the time spent with this game we only found one other player online, and were unfortunately unable to connect with them. Obviously it’s not going to be as popular as most of the winter’s big releases, but it would be a real shame the the online lobbies remain empty. As ever with co-op - particularly with friends - a lot of a game’s mistakes can be forgiven when playing through together online, but we can’t conclusively comment on this aspect if there’s nobody to play with. We can attest that the game is silly fun in two player offline co-op, and it can be made even more chaotic and enjoyable by being able to turn ‘friendly fire’ on or off.

FairyTale Fights uses the Unreal Engine 3, and while it’s obviously not in the same league as BioShock or Mirror’s Edge, it has a pleasing and colourful art style and looks like a fairy tale premise should look (including nice little incidental touches such as landscapes made from books). Much has been made of the ‘Volumetric Liquid System’, which is quite funny from an artistic point of view - think the gore in Kill Bill depicted in crayons. There’s something darkly amusing about literally sliding through a pool of blood from mutilated enemies. The characters don’t have voices besides yelps and kiddy noises, but the understated soundtrack kicks in occasionally with a cute little ditty. Characters and level designs are recogniseable and memorable, and generally they’ve nailed the fairy tale aspect from a visual perspective.

FairyTale Fights is a likeable game with a fun style and surprisingly dark sense of humour, but it’s let down by simplistic level design, a lack of substance and undeveloped combat. The co-op modes are sincerely welcome and the bare bones of a good hack-and-slash are here, and there are some nice physics and comical little touches going on. However, at the end of the day the gameplay is spread a little too thin to really stand out in what is quite a crowded sub-genre.