Fairytale Fights Review

"But Grandmother! What big teeth you have," said Little Red Riding Hood, her voice quivering slightly. "All the better to eat you with, my dear" roared the wolf, and he leapt out of the bed and began to chase the little girl.

Then Little Red Riding Hood pulled out her giant axe and decapitated the wolf, sending his head flipping end over end towards the door, spraying his blood all over the furniture - or, at least in Fairytale Fight's version of the fairytale, this is what would probably have happened.

Put simply, this game is twisted. Twisted beyond belief.

Imagine the cutest game world ever, where blue cows moo amid the grass and cute bunnies play as the babbling brook meanders around the screen. Then imagine that your hero or heroine, either Red Riding Hood, Jack (of beanstalk fame), the Naked Emperor (from the Emperor's New Clothes) or Sleeping Beauty; comes in and kills everything, layering the screen in streamers of blood and guts, slicing the cute bunnies in half and melting the cows with acid.

Jarring image isn't it? It certainly bothered me a bit!

The set up is simple- in fairytale land these four heroes have been usurped by a new hero. In an effort to regain their notoriety, the four launch themselves off on missions for various fairytale legends, like the three bears and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and have to win back their supporters.

To do this they have to face off against staples of the fairytale world, chop a path from one screen to the next and complete a few tricky puzzles, all while killing everything in sight, with a variety of spells and dozens and dozens of blades, clubs and axes (even a massive carrot.)

The story is weak however, and since the characters don't speak, communicating entirely in grunts, it becomes laughable very quickly - it seemed to me that the developers just wanted to revel in the bloodlust of killing so many cute characters - this is a game for sadists.

There's a decent amount of things to do though, and the missions are varied enough to hold your interest for a while, but eventually mauling your way through ream after ream of psychotic woodmen, rabbits and cute little kiddies becomes incredibly boring, despite the interesting control system the game has adapted for the combat.

The combat is executed using the analogue stick to pull off combos, combined with a couple of the face buttons for the more interesting attacks. The large amount of weapons laying around makes the combat a bit different every time, but the enemies are really easy to defeat and require no forethought or planning to rip to shreds.

As you progress the game also keeps track of the number of kills with each weapon, and there are a few PS3 trophies waiting for anyone with the stomach to butcher a certain number of cows and cute bunnies, for example.

Graphically the game is decent enough. The fairytale worlds are rendered nicely, with the various green pastures and wide rivers sticking to the outlandish and garish style of the action. The camera, however, is a nightmare.

Sticking to a fixed-angle view, the camera sometimes wanders off the action and has to rush to catch up with the psychopathic fairytale character. It also sometimes changes direction abruptly, and some of the trickier puzzles are rendered twice as difficult thanks to the odd angle.

The sound design is also flawed. While the music is a mix of pretty 'chimes in the breeze' happiness and more brutal battle hymns, the constant squelching of the bloodletting and the 'clink' of metal on metal are about the only sounds on offer, and they start to grate quickly. The developers should have made the main characters incredibly foul mouthed, as this would have made the game all the funnier to play, and would have allowed you to enjoy playing as each of the four main fairytale legends. As it is, the differences between the four protagonists only stretch as far as a few different melee attacks, with no major changes between them otherwise.

While there is a multiplayer mode it's pretty much a drop-in-drop-out co-op similar to a dozen DLC games, and finding anyone else who owned the game was difficult - perhaps there aren't as many psychopaths out there in the world as I'd thought.

Summary

Playing like a cross between Shrek, Happy Tree Friends and my psychopathic dreams of world domination, Fairytale Fights is an unfunny, dull and repetitive slasher with a serious mental problem. It's fun for a while, but gets boring quickly. It is, however, rather good for de-stressing after work...