Review: Fairytale Fights (PS3)

...with mind numbing repetitive combat, infuriating platform gameplay and fit inducing boss battles.

Fairytale Fights on the PlayStation 3 contrives to combine virtually all of my most hated design flaws into a big festering pile of frustration. It clearly had fairly high production values and there are some good ideas in here but the design is awful and there is a major lack of polish. This is easily one of the worst third-person action games of recent years and there will be no happy ending in this review.

Let’s look at the positives first because there are a few. The initial idea of a bloodthirsty trip through your childhood fairytales is a good one. Take a pinch of Grimm’s, a sheet of acid and wrap it up in a kaleidoscope of colour. This twisted take on the land of fairytales is a decent backdrop for a slash and bash action platformer. You get to choose from four characters, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Jack of Beanstalk fame and the Naked Emperor. The game also supports 4 way multiplayer co-op, split screen and online.

The art team really went to town on this one. There’s no doubt it is garish and there are environments that will have you reaching for your sunglasses but it is also visually inventive. The characters are rendered in a warped, cartoon style where everything is out of proportion and some of them show a creative flair, the conjoined Hansel and Gretel were particularly good. The environments also show some invention and visually some of the hazards are clever. The cut scenes are well handled and the animation standard is generally high throughout.

Downhill

While the art team went to town on Fairytale Fights the design team must have gone on holiday. The positives are out of the way and we plummet downhill from here. The linear levels challenge you to negotiate corridor maps and slaughter huge numbers of enemies, from maniac lumberjacks to legions of gingerbread men. The combat is monotonous and dull in the extreme. You simply tap the right stick to pull off combinations. There are weapons dotted everywhere which you can pick up with R1 and despite the huge choice they come down to slash, bludgeon or ranged. There was some fun to be had with the chainsaw and the first few gory kills brought a smile to my lips but the repetitive nature of the gameplay soon wiped it away.

The camera angle and the fact it feels as though your character is skating on ice makes the numerous platform jumps extremely tough to judge. I have no desire to relive the countless hours I spent playing games with platform jumps which result in instant death if you don’t make them first time. There are loads of moments like that in Fairytale Fights. There are also a lot of hazards which you couldn’t possibly see coming which leaves you in the inevitable position of having to die a lot in order to figure out what to do next. Death means nothing because you instantly respawn on the spot having lost a little money. The money you collect as you travel this bizarre world is completely useless anyway. The only thing I could find to spend it on was a statue in the main menu village.

There is no escaping the fact that this feels extremely shoddy. On the very first level I got stuck in the map because I tried to jump back to collect a jewel as the camera moved forward. The only way to progress was to quit the game and lose my unsaved progress. The copious enemies you’ll face frequently get stuck in the scenery and on one irritating level a droopy armed gingerbread man that I needed to kill in order to advance contrived to get stuck further back in the map where I couldn’t reach him. This meant quitting and restarting the level because the next door would only be triggered when all of the gingerbread men were dead.

Repetitive

The repetitive nature of the gameplay is accentuated by the repeated map sections. In cartoon style they’ll actually throw the same exact bit of map at you again accompanied by another wave of the same enemies. The only way they could make this experience more irritating for me was to throw in illogical boss battles. Yep you’ve guessed it there are indeed a series of moronic, badly designed bosses to beat. These bosses have no health bar and by the time you figure out what the designer wants you to do you’ll be wondering if you have died and gone to hell. Satan himself could not have designed a more annoying experience than this. On the Pied Piper level I managed to pile up over 50 deaths on the boss ending, having died once on the way there. The majority of the bosses, like the Candy Witch, also pretend to die and then you have to repeat the same sequence again to kill them a second time.

The whole experience was rendered slightly more excruciating by the terrible sound effects. The sound effect brought about by using the Circle button to close menus is the most annoying sound effect I’ve ever had to repetitively endure (maybe with the exception of the puking kids in Theme Park). There is also a disappointing lack of voiceover to accompany the cut scenes and characters just grunt and squeal which doesn’t lend much to their personality. The musical score, somewhat surprisingly, is actually pretty good and the music generally fits in well with the on screen action.

You may imagine that this is supposed to be a kid’s game but the gore levels have earned it a 16 PEGI rating. Maybe hardcore platform fans or people who like monotonous beat ‘em up gameplay will enjoy this. I’m struggling to see a potential audience. The design is antiquated and badly implemented and the bugs should have been fixed before release. In fairytale terms this game is a poisoned apple and if it doesn’t kill you it will probably put you to sleep.