Released last Tuesday on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC by Playlogic, Fairytale Fights is one of the craziest games I’ve ever played. You haven’t heard of it? Yea, I hadn’t either, but let me tell you, this game is nuts! Basically all hell has broken loose in Fairytale land, and you’ve got to try and restore peace. But what’s the best way to do that? That’s right, with a hatchet and a chainsaw! Oh yea, this is one of the bloodiest, happiest, WTF games I’ve ever seen. I’d like to thank Playlogic for providing me with a copy of this crazy ass game to play. Here are my thoughts on Fairytale Fights.
So here’s the story. Some guy is messing up all of the fairy tales. Little Red Riding Hood shows up to Granny’s house only to find this guy stealing all of the glory. He then wakes up Snow White, and obviously she’s gonna be all pissed after being asleep for so many years. Then he comes riding into town on a shiny horse just as Beanstalk Jack is showing off his bean and steals all of his thunder too. Finally this dude convinces the Naked Emperor to get, well, naked and go in front of all of his people, thus scaring them off. So we’ve got 4 fairy tale characters whose stories are all messed up, and they’re going to seek revenge. The game begins with you chasing after some bandits who have stolen the porridge from the 3 bears, and really, things escalate pretty quickly and off you go to save all of the fairy tales.
From start to finish you’re looking at roughly 8 hours of gameplay for the campaign, which consists of a TON of levels. Fairytale Fights can be played single player, but the real fun comes from the drop-in-drop-out 4-player co-op, which can all be played on a single console, or over Xbox live. You even get an option to turn on friendly fire so you can beat the crap out of your friends either in the campaign, or the multiplayer arena mode.
The design of the levels are actually really cool with a wide variety of challenges to overcome. The game is a 3d side-scroller that combines button mashing with some simple platforming. You’ll travel through all kinds of different fairy tales and encounter all of your favorite characters from your childhood. There are also statistics stored for basically everything that you do including how many times you die, what you killed and with what weapons and how much money you earned and lost throughout your journey.
Basically in Fairytale Fights you’re going to be running around as one of the 4 primary characters beating the crap out of anything that moves to seek revenge for the clearly terrible injustice that has been brought upon you. You’ll do so with over 140 ridiculous weapons like a bird’s nest, sword fish, ice-cream sword and several different kinds of guns and potions. And did I mention this game is bloody? Oh yea, this game is so bloody that you’ll find your character skating and slipping around in it. There’s even an achievement for spilling 10,000 gallons of blood!
The game mechanics are actually really simple and as such, tend to get repetitive pretty quickly, so you’re definitely going to want to get a bunch of buddies on one screen to play this so you can talk smack and joke around the whole time. Throughout your journey you’ll encounter a wide variety of foes including lumberjacks and gingerbread men, and you’ll come across various traps that you’ll have to get by or get mutilated. Luckily, you have unlimited lives and you respawn right where you die a few seconds later. While you play you will collect money from defeated enemies and from treasure chests. This money is used to purchase a statue in town that reflects all of your glory, as well as additional weapons throughout the level. As you take damage and die you’ll lose your money quickly, so that’s really the only negative side effect to dying. At the end of most of the levels you’ll come across some serious boss fights, that if you didn’t have unlimited lives, I feel would be extremely challenging, hell, this whole game would be challenging without unlimited lives, because you’re die a lot!
Now, if you haven’t noticed yet, the graphics in the game, while very beautiful, can seem a bit overwhelming at times. You might be surprised to know that this is actually running on the Unreal Engine 3. Now, because there are so many bright colors and so much detail, you’ll sometimes find it difficult to tell what the heck is going on. Combine that with a wonky camera that likes to zoom way out at the least opportune times and you’re just going to be squinting your eyes just to keep tabs on your character. This is probably by design to keep things interesting, considering you have unlimited lives though. Aside from that, the artwork is fantastic and some of the things you’ll see your character do are hilarious!
There isn’t really any voice acting in the game, but the soundtrack is amazing. You can tell some serious effort was put into it because it really draws you in and makes you feel like you’re watching a Disney movie or something.
Man this is a weird game. Fairytale Fights will bring you back to your childhood as you adventure through some of your favorite fairy tales with a hatchet or a chainsaw, spilling gallons upon gallons of blood on everything in sight. The graphics at times can be a bit overwhelming and the gameplay can get pretty repetitious, but if you’ve got some buddies over and want a decent 4 player co-op game where you can beat the crap out of everything you see, you might just like this one. I’m not sure I’d pay 60 bucks for it, but I can see this being one of those cult classic games and I’d probably pick it up once the price drops a bit.
