Introduction
Fairytale Fights is a cutesy, bloody, vicious little game that’s completely uncomplicated but a lot of fun. You’re thrown into a fairytale land of familiar storybook elements (big bad wolves, giants, bears, porridge and so on) but with both a modern, hyperviolent, videogame take on the whole thing AND some rather trippy elements that make the game even more surreal and peculiar than you might already think it would be.
Story
The story is pretty flimsy, but there’s one of more substance than – for example – Bayonetta. A new fairytale hero, a tailor, rolls into town and takes attention away from the traditional heroes of story land. He rescues Grandma before Red Riding Hood can, he upstages Jack, fools The Emperor into parading around naked and breaks Snow White out of her glass case early, driving her twitchingly crazy.
With all their kudos and hero worship pulled onto him, the tailor’s actions threaten to write the heroes out of their own stories completely! When a new crisis occurs – the three bear’s magic porridge cauldron is stolen – the displaced heroes see a chance to regain their fame. There’s additional pressure from the fact that the giant has taken their storybook to burn on his fire, so they only have a limited time to fix their story and rescue their reputation before their stories are lost forever.
The heroes set off on the first part of the adventure, pursuing the porridge, princesses, storybooks and fame.
Gameplay
The game is a completely linear combination of bloody violence and simple platforming. You don’t have lives, you can die as much as you want all that happens is that you lose collected money. You can pick up a huge variety of weapons from around the world, each of which is rated 1-5 stars, rating how much damage it does. Everything from squeaky toy bunny rabbits to singing swords that chime out ‘Laaaaa!’ as you cleave people in half.
The game is very cartoonish, but extremely bloody. You can swing your sword/stick/lollipop by twitching the right hand stick, while moving with the left hand stick. Swinging you can squish your enemies or chop them into pieces, sending limbs flying and spraying so much blood that you can slide around on it.
And that’s about it… it’s not deep, it’s not complicated, but it is fun.
Atmosphere
The whole game is completely demented and plays like a bad acid trip by the brother’s Grimm. It’s bright – almost fluorescent – bloody and demented. Again, it ain’t deep, but it does the trick.
Graphics
Simple and cartoonish, the graphics do what they need to do – which is to be a combination of cute, bloody and sinister. The only downside of the game is that it is SO bright that it feels like the video output is wrong or that something is wrong with your television – it isn’t but it certainly looks like it and it’s eye-searingly bright.
Conclusion
Bloody, violent and cute the game suffers from a total lack of depth and it swings, violently, between frustrating difficulty and multiple deaths, and dull simplicity. It’s fun but there’s no replay value – play isn’t different between the various characters. The level design is also inconsistent, with only the early levels and the last level really showing complete creativity and interest. Worth picking up for a few giggles secondhand, but not really worth picking up new.
Score
Style: 4
Substance: 1
Overall: 2.5
Postmortem Studios 