Playlogic’s latest offering, Fairytale Fights, is a violent take on the lives of some of the most famous fairytale characters from history. A mysterious character is ruining your reputation as a hero, and you must fight your way through a very violent and bloody storybook world, in an effort to reclaim your status. The game pushes to accentuate the irony of the bloody conflict taking place in an otherwise serene and colorful world made of books and candy. Characters will slip-and-slide through pools of their enemy’s blood, while they dynamically slice-and-dice from one storybook to another.
The game is a straight side-scrolling brawler with a few jumping puzzles scattered through each level. There is no way to lose. Like a Lego adventure game, one simply loses money when killed, and if the player has no more money, the only death penalty is the loss of the currently wielded weapon, which you can’t keep from level to level, anyhow. There are a few features which are new to the Brawler genre, and those are worth paying attention to, but when you get past the novelties, you’ve seen all this before.
Pursuit
Naked Emperor
Players can choose from four preset characters: Riding Hood, Snow White, Beanstalk Jack, and Naked Emperor. The only difference is the character model. There are no stats, and characters never advance in level, equip new items, or otherwise improve in any way. This means that each level is begun in roughly the same situation, and other than boss-fights, the game never really presents the character with anything new to learn beyond the initial understanding of the controls. This means that, while multi-player is more fair, and easier to actively join at any time, there is also a distinct lack of variety to the game, and the action quickly becomes repetitive.
The starting objective is to retrieve the Three Bear’s cauldron, so that they can once again make soup. This is only a token plot however, as it is never really fully explained, and serves simply as an excuse to move the game from one area to another. Since the game is fully linear anyway, it doesn’t matter much why you go where you are going, but I think the stakes could have been raised a bit higher than this. At least at the beginning of the game, it’s difficult to get into the motivation. After a few minutes of play, I stopped myself between battles with lumberjacks, and tried to remember why I was doing all this killing. I couldn’t answer the question, since the missing cauldron didn’t really seem like it would be important to my character. “Why can’t the bears just buy a new cauldron?”, I wanted to know. “Is there something special about this one?” Then I forgot about it, and moved on. I think the issue here is that the plot isn’t really explained. The game tries really hard not to interrupt the experience too much with story-telling, but I think it could have done with just a little bit more.
The boss fights are interesting. As a break from the repetitive enemy beating, each boss monster has a unique sequence of moves and jumps required to finish the stage. These battles are the most fun part of the game, as they require the player to learn the patterns and moves of the monster, and defeating the bosses is a satisfying accomplishment.
Multi-player unfortunately gets old pretty fast, especially if friendly-fire is turned on. Even if you don’t want to attack the other players, it’s very difficult not to hit them while attacking the enemies. Any level attempted with four players moves very slowly, and quickly devolves into a brawling match among the players. It’s fun for a little while, but since there is very little strategy in the combat, it gets tired after only a few minutes. Fortunately, friendly-fire can be turned off. The arena battle mode is simply uninteresting. The players are thrown into a Smash Bros. style arena, and let to duke it out, but, again, with no real tactics involved in the combat, there isn’t much point.
Panorama
The backgrounds, while well-crafted, are at points too bright and colorful.
Part of the irony intended in the game comes from the bright and vibrant design of the storybook world. First, this is odd because many of these classic stories were originally very bloody and gruesome anyway, and only since the Disney Era have these stories become colorful and child-like. Second, the world is too colorful. The colors are actually so bright and sharply contrasting that it is difficult to concentrate on what is actually going on in the game. I think a more muted, and intentionally dark artistic style would have suited the game much more. They simply tried too hard to hit an irony which actually isn’t there.
The characters are intentionally hideous, and I get that, but after awhile, the Happy Tree Friends style grotesqueness of every single character, creature, and monster becomes a bit wearing, especially in combination with the bright colors mentioned above.
Also, the blood physics in the game don’t live up to the promises made during the game’s development. It was claimed that the blood would use advanced liquid physics, and that it would interact realistically with the environment. It doesn’t do this at all. The place where it is most obvious is where the characters have to wade through water. Rather than turning the water pink or read, the blood just falls through it like air, and sits at the bottom of the waterway.
While the special zoom camera shows wicked attacks in detail, it also obscures about half the screen.
Sometimes a special zoomed shot pops up on one side of the screen or the other, showing what one of the characters is doing in detail. This is fine when it does it for special moves, because those pause the game for the other players anyway, and it certainly doesn’t bother anyone in single-player mode, but when it does it during a normal attack, it blocks half of the screen for everyone, and causes other players to loose track of where they are, and often causes other players to die from unseen enemy attacks, or from stepping off the level or into an environmental hazard (which all kill instantly). The point here is to showcase the internal rendering that is done for each figure, which, while neat, is just another novelty. Luckily you can turn the zoom camera down to only show up for special attacks.
Noise
The music and sound effects blend into the game well, so much so that I didn’t really pick up on it, which is a good thing.
Reigns
Another big gimmick for this game is the control scheme. Instead of using buttons for attack, the player flicks the right control stick, and the character’s weapon swings in that direction. However, this is another feature that didn’t really live up to the potential. The player does not get direct control over the character’s weapon, the way it sounds like they would. There are really just four attacks, and there is no discernible difference between any of them, other than the animation, so not only could they have just used the buttons, but that would have made it easier to mash the controls, since that seems to be the only real tactic involved in combat anyway.
There a lot of weapons to choose from, but they are just different looking versions of the same weapons over and over. There are guns, bows, swords, and clubs, and the swords and clubs have varying power levels (from one to five stars), each of the weapons in the game just falls into one of these categories. There are no weapons with special abilities, stat boosts, alternate ranges,or different ammunition.
The jumping puzzles are anything but casual in difficulty.
The jumping puzzles are the only part of the game that could actually hold back one’s progress, and they don’t scale in any way. The difficulty can be set to “casual” if you want, but it doesn’t change the jumping puzzles, which are the only thing keeping the game from being casual in the first place. Since there is no real penalty for death, there is nothing difficult about enemies with stronger attacks or more life, they just make the game take longer. The difficult things for a casual gamer would only be the jumping and timing puzzles—some of which can be frustrating to an entire group when playing multi-player, since the whole team has to wait for the one casual gamer who keeps failing the same jumping puzzle over and over. There is no way to move on if one person is lagging behind.
Encoding
The camera is a bit buggy, but it only seemed to be an issue in multi-player mode. Sometimes the camera would move on, as if the players were going to the next area, leaving one or more of the characters off of the screen. When this would happen, even having all of the players walk back does not return the screen to a view that allows the missing player to see what they are doing, and they must navigate blind until they reach the screen again. This can be nearly impossible if there is a jump to make along the way.
I’m not sure if it’s actually a bug, but it was a bit frustrating that when a weapon was sitting on the ground with no ammunition in it, it still read “10” in the pop-over description for the ammo. This was a non-issue when playing single-player, since it’s easy to keep track of the weapons that you’ve dropped when alone, but with four people playing the game, one person would drop an empty weapon, and everyone else would pick that weapon at least once, thinking that it could be used, only to find it empty. Really, since they can never be reloaded anyway, the ranged weapons should just disappear entirely when expended.
Last Word
Fairytale Fights is neat, and fun to an extent, but the novelty and humor wears through quickly, and the game as a whole seems a little rushed, and doesn’t quite live up to its potential. The visual style is something that only a few players will really appreciate. Any multi-player in the game feels broken and a couple of the neat features have to be turned off in order to make the game even playable for more than one person. It’s not all bad, but the quality and features are around the level I expect from a second-tier LIVE Arcade game, not a top-tier, high budget production. If you really enjoy side-scrolling brawlers, and you’re only looking to play by yourself, you’ll want to pick this one up, but everyone else should probably keep their distance, at least until the price goes down.
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