REVIEW: Fairytale Fights (X360)

If there's even just one thing that Happy Tree Friends has taught us, it's that destroying innocence is fucking hilarious - take a bunch of cute characters of general kid's cartoon stereotype, then have them maim the crap out of each other. Fairytale Fights follows much the same example, putting you in the shoes of one of four classic fairytale characters (Red Riding Hood, Jack (and the Beanstalk), Snow White and the Naked Emperor), then gives you sharp instruments and a crowd of enemies. You guess what happens next. Simple mechanics and ludicrous blood are easily what makes this game - the problem is, most everything else is not up to scratch.

The first thing worth noting is that there's no actual attack button - to swing a weapon, you tap the right control stick in the direction you want to swing, and if you want a stronger swing, you hold it down in one direction, then shift it over to your intended swing direction. You can probably guess that this is quite confusing and awkward at first, but it doesn't take too long to adapt to, at least with the faster moves. However, despite its simplicity it feels like an extremely unecessary control scheme - you almost never have any incentive to swing in a specific direction. It only even affects gameplay differently in a grand total of two possibilities: launching enemies upwards into an air combo (which, again, is extremely confusing and at first seems to occur completely at random), and a shockwave attack (which is only accessible with a strong attack anyway). The rest of it is just the same move with different animations, to the point that you might as well have used an actual face button for the attacks instead. Not that this particularly gets in the way of the fun too heavily, it just comes off as incredibly pointless.

One thing it DOES tax on, however, is the camera. Now let's face it, anyone old enough to legally be interested in this kind of shit has the common sense to realize that the right stick should be used to guide the camera, or at the very least if it doesn't, that the auto-guided camera be some kind of gift from god that magically knows exactly where the player wants to be looking at any and all given times. And in Fairytale Fights, that, it isn't. For the most part it's barely enough to get by on, but you'll find it's not all too uncommon to be killed by enemies and hazards that aren't even onscreen, and on occasion you'll find yourself thrown with a camera angle that seems absolutely fucking hell bent on hiding enemies and treasure chests behind obstacles in the foreground, completely ruining your platforming either before or during tricky jumping sessions, or generally just throwing you for a loop by making it as hard as humanly possible to see just what the fuck you're actually doing.

Speaking of platforming, by fuck does this game want you dead. As if the camera wasn't bad enough, the hazards themselves are a work of sheer masochism that almost universally punish you with death for the slightest of slip-ups, can literally occur with no perceivable warning, and... well, perhaps this can be best explained with a single, memorable example. Imagine there are circular saws suspended in the air, and you have to actually jump on them and use them as platforms without touching the edges. Fair enough, not exactly unheard of in a platformer. Now imagine you have to jump between multiple blades at a time, and that you're constantly moved around on the surface of the spinning saw to fuck up your precision. Imagine that they have fucking blades within blades around the centre of the saw, forcing you to teeter the the sharp edge on the brink of the blade and the additionally edges spinning on the inside. Imagine that this all happens in the third fucking level of the game, at a time where you're still trying to get a basic grasp of the game. Now hold on, I'm not done yet. Additional to that, you have a camera angle not ideal for so many factors, the fact that your shadow is very difficult to see and possibly out-of-place due to dynamic lighting, making your jumps potentially innaccurate, and the possibility of multiple players attempting the same obstacle, resulting in the camera trying to keep all players onscreen with complete disregard for the lead player attempting to jump on an offscreen obstacle, and the fact that players can push and nudge each other around both deliberately AND accidentally is just icing on the motherfucking cake.

I mean, christ on a fuckstick, guys. It ain't quite I-Wanna-Be-The-Guy material, but it's starting to get pretty damn close. The only thing preventing it from being worse is the extremely lenient infinite lives system that respawns you frequently mere inches from where you last died.

Okay, maybe I went a little overboard there, so let's go back to what the game's best at and pretend for a moment those issues don't exist: simple, arcadey hack n' slash, and the riduculous, uncharacteristic amount of gore it yields. It's a button masher to be sure (or erm, a stick masher if you choose to be fucking picky), but the best bits are simply visual rewards for killing people. When you kill someone with a cutting weapon, their body is almost always bisected perfectly along the exact angle of the cut - the first time I've ever seen anything of this sort of such precision in a videogame. This goes double for the "Glory Attack" mode, enabling you to go absolutely apeshit with these slices and make multiple perfect cuts varying by the direction of the swing, making end results ranging from people divided into perfect quarters to poor sods sliced into sections so thin you could probably spread them onto a sandwhich like a piece of salami. And the blood? An intended and effective selling point of the game, as not only does it spill in such large amounts that you could literally paint entire buildings with, but a technology dubbed "volumetric liquid" enables it to actually behave like a realistic liquid, spraying onto other people, spreading across the ground over time, and to the delight of two of the game's achievements, even allows players to slide on it. This is definitive cartoon violence at its best, and in a videogame you probably won't see anything better for a long, long time. However, as far as sound and graphics go, the violence is all the game has going for it - other than that, the game has a severe lack of visual polish. Nearly all textures are damn-near flat, animations lack the visual oomph of a higher budget game, and sound? Outside of nasty slicing sounds, extremely underwhelming and sometimes nonexistent, and the game has a bad habit of using songs in the soundtrack in very unfitting contexts, even if some of them are pleasant on their own.

Finally, there's the boss fights. Most of the smaller bosses involve beating down on some fucktard until he stops moving, then pushing them into a hazard repeatedly until they don't get up again - understandably, this gets really tired and predictable once you figure it out the first time. The bigger bosses though, while not much better as far as repetition goes, really know how to make you feel really small, something other games rarely touch on like this. It's like the level itself works for them, and they won't hesitate to use it to try and kill you - ranging from tilting the entire platform you're standing on to try and knock you off, to blowing so damn hard that you have to practically glue the control stick in the opposite direction to avoid getting impaled on a nearby hazard. The rest is mostly pattern exploitation that, honestly, has gotten extremely old in the biz as of late, but for what it's worth, at least they feel genuinely big for a change.

Defining Points
- Blood, lots of it and just about as realisitic as possible in a videogame, along with extremely precise dismemberment that would usually have been generic and scripted to a small list of possibilities, sets a new bar for videogame blood and gore that is unlikely to be topped for quite a while.

- Gameplay is relatively simplistic on a basic level. Even if there are usually better tricks that the game doesn't properly introduce you to, the bare basics can be learned within a single level, making this as arcadey and pick-up-n'-play as they come.

- The larger bosses have some very interesting setpieces, on a scale few games out there can compete with.

What could've been done better
- Straight to the point, the platforming sucks. A combination of unsuitable camera angles, bad platforming shadow, masochistic level and hazard design, unsuitable camera angles, unintentional team-killing, unsuitable camera angles and unsuitable camera angles completely ruin any sense of fun and fairness that could have been earned from pressing the jump button, and hell, sometimes you'll find yourself falling off edges simply for attacking enemies too close to them. Did I mention unsuitable camera angles?

- The game overall suffers from a big lack of polish outside of the blood and gore it prides itself on, and yet, somehow still finds way to lag your system down nevertheless. In extreme circumstances it's possible to actually lag so badly that the game can freeze for a whole second or two, making me wonder if anyone actually tested this game very well.

- For the most part, using the right stick as an attack method comes off as pointless where using a button could easily have yielded a comparable, if not exactly the same, result. Which is infuriating in comparison to the horrendous unsuitable camera angles it inadvertantly causes.

- unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles unsuitable camera angles

Overall...

4/10: Fairytale Fights is practically a one-trick pony, excelling in one area whilst performing average at best, horrible at worst in every other. If you can persist through the godawful platforming sequences and unsuitable camera angles then perhaps one could find pleasure in simple slash-'em-up gameplay and ludicrous blood, but to absolutely nobody else would I recommend a purchase of this game. Such technology deserves far better treatment than this.



unsuitable camera angles