Fairytale Fights Review

Fairytale Fights is a curious game, it's not great by any means but it's held aloft by a pretty solid presentation for the first hour or so. Playlogic seem to have gone the dark humour route with the game and have managed to shoehorn in, numerous classic fairytale references and a host of adorable, bloodthirsty and violent characters. Trust me; you've never seen Little Red Ridinghood, Jack, Snow White or any of the other cutesy heroes and heroines of various Hans Christian Anderson and Brothers Grimm tales, like this.

I want to like the game, I really do...but...there's something about it that grates on me after a while.

Gameplay

Hack, slash, mayhem. It reminds me, in a way, of God of War, Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry in that you have lots of enemies and you dismember them violently. You control one of the fairytale heroes and set about bringing your unique brand of cartoon violence justice to the kingdom, movement is done on the left stick and you attack on the right. A quick tap will do one move, a few more taps performs others and holding the stick does a powerful move. There's a special move too, as you might expect but by this time my eyes were starting to glaze over as I waded polygon deep in gore, or slipped around in pools of cartoon blood.

The problem is that the combat system isn't really deep enough, there's no real reason to collect the various treasures and so on from around the game's levels, bar upgrading a statue (big whoop) that sits in your hub-like home town. The town where you can examine stats and so on, a town that could have been replaced with some quick access menus to undermine the tedium of visiting it.

You can find wells, wells will give you weapons in exchange for treasure...but since there's a load of weapons and the new ones are just marginally better, why bother spending anything when you can slaughter people and things, take their gear and use it to slaughter more people and things, rinse-repeat.

You can fight in arena battles with up to 3 other people, or play cooperatively with friends.

Graphics

It's cute, it's nice to look at and it's incredibly twisted in places due to the hack and slash cartoon gore. It doesn't push the PS3 at all, but it's nice enough and that's all I can really say about it.

Physics

The usual, it's there and it plays a part in the dismemberment, which is amusing in its own way and tickles a dark side of the psyche for a while.

Animation

It's nicely animated, going along with the superb presentation in terms of graphics. Some of the attacks are bone-jarringly cool and if you're easily amused with cartoon gore, you'll probably love some of the dismemberments.

AI

Nothing to write home about, enemies have various attack patterns and you'll probably not even notice since you'll be slipping around on pools of their blood.

Sound

Passable, decent enough and has a fair few amusing sounds to go along with the rampaging sword and shotgun action. Music is nice enough, voice and dialogue is passable but you never really notice anything, usually because the first hour is spent being wowed by the presentation, until you realise that you're doing the same thing over and over again.

Multiplayer

Up to 3 friends can join you for some arena style action, or cooperative hack and slash through the game's levels.

Stab!

It's the mind-numbing boredom that kills the game for you in the end, when you realise there's nothing really to do but slay hundreds of cute and not-so cute critters in the game, it becomes a grind and even the humour wears thin after a while. You can have thousands of weapons, but if you don't have something to spend and things up upgrade it very quickly becomes a tiresome hackathon.

Might be worth a rent.