I got to see an early demo of Playlogic’s Fairytale Fights at E3, and what they had to show me so far was impressive. The basic premise is that the protagonist is a washed-up fairytale character (the only two they showed were Riding Hood and Snow White, but they promised two more playable characters by release, and potentially more through DLC) who must become a hero in fairytale land in order to regain her reputation.
The world is made of books and paper
This game is full of bright colors and dark humor. The world itself is made of books, and the old fairytales that we all know from childhood have been twisted and confused. One of the first missions involves hacking one’s way through a community of lumberjacks to take back what they stole from the friendly town. Every lumberjack must die to accomplish this mission, and they will die in very gruesome ways.
The big gimmick here is the unique, dynamic slicing engine that Playlogic calls “Salami Violence”. The main game-play style is side-scrolling and fighting, with scale and pacing very similar to the popular Castle Crashers game for XBox Live, but the control scheme is very different in order to accommodate this Salami Violence: The character moves with the left stick, as usual, and the character’s weapon is controlled with the right stick. The stick will supposedly represent a direct control of the weapon, leading to an endless number of possible types of weapon swings and combos. I didn’t get to try the controls myself to feel how fluid and natural they are, but I did get to see the purpose and result of all this. The enemies can be ‘dynamically sliced’. Wherever your weapon hits the enemy for a final blow, that is where the enemy will be severed, and every foe has internal textures that are shown when their insides are exposed. Theoretically, you could get through the entire game, and never see two enemies sliced up exactly the same way.
Of course, this wouldn’t be much fun without blood that sprays and pours like a bad kung-fu movie. That’s where Playlogic’s volumetric liquid system comes in. They’ve added a new system of dealing with volumes of liquid to the engine (Unreal 3, BTW) which allows the blood and other liquids to flow and mix realistically. Expect blood to waterfall off of the level if many enemies are fought in one place, see bloody footprints to show up as you walk away from a fight, and when you fight enemies over a pool of water or acid, watch the other liquid get slowly more red with each slice.
Riding Hood stands surrounded by blood that sprays and flows
Not all the weapons are big knives, however. You start the game with only your fists, and must to find weapons along the way. However, not all of them are for slicing and dicing, there are also blunt weapons and ranged weapons to find. When the game is ready for release there will be over 100 weapons to find
As expected the game will feature a multi-player mode. It will be local & online, and it will be fully active join. It’s not necessarily co-op however, as the multi-player mode is designed to be quite competitive. The dropped resources are limited and unshared, and it is always possible to slice up the other players.
Look for Fairytale fights to hit the shelves in 4Q 2009 for the XBox360, PS3, and PC.
Two of Fairytale Fights' main characters
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