Fairytale Fights Hands-On
What happens when you give Little Red Riding Hood a chainsaw?
July 30, 2009 - Offering a gory take on a cute and colorful fantasy world, Playlogic's Fairytale Fights lets you run around as one of four famous characters wielding deadly weaponry and spilling copious amounts of vital fluids. It seems Little Red Riding Hood and crew are fed up with a world that no longer holds them in high regard, so they're slashing their way through to renewed fame and notoriety. Developed internally at Playlogic, the title offers the option for four-player local play and two-player online across a number of stages with plenty of opportunity for bloody beat-em-up action.
We recently had the chance to go hands-on with one stage of the game, and found it feels a little different from what you might expect. Instead of simply having weak and strong attacks tied to face buttons on your controller, the attacks in the game are controlled with the right thumbstick, with movement tied to the left. In this way you can control the angle and swing power of your slashes with any number of the game's wide variety of tools. You'll find more standard weapons like axes, clubs, and pipes along with more fanciful fare such as compasses with pencils strapped on such as you may have used in school. These can be snatched off of the ground after being dropped from treasure chests or from defeated foes, and up to two can be stored on your character at a time and switched between freely. This carrying capacity is especially helpful when holding on to ranged weaponry like rifles, since each shot consumes a gauge that's refilled by switching back to melee.
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Other battle controls include a jump, a push move, and a block that can help you power past groups of foes. You'll also need to pay attention to how you're swinging your weapon with the right thumbstick, since direction can dramatically affect how attacks are chained together. For instance, if you tilt up on the thumbstick relative to an enemy's position, you can launch them into the air, then follow that up with a string of air combos to more rapidly whittle down their health. In addition to enabling you to chain more hits together this way, it also keeps you out of range of whatever other enemies may be stalking around on the ground, meaning for at least a short while you won't have to worry about getting smacked with a club while your attention is focused on another target.
Once you finally do inflict enough punishment on single target, you'll find they tend to leak quite a bit of gruesome fluid onto the ground. So much, in fact, that it will actually impact your movement. Great bright red puddles of the stuff collect on the otherwise cheery cartoon backgrounds and cause your character to slip and slide all over. As you move and jump out it, you'll find your character tracks red footprints for a while as well. To help emphasize the element of violence in the game, picture-in-picture windows will pop up as you hack foes to pieces to show exactly how they've been cut. It seems the game allows for its character models to be sliced apart pretty much anywhere, so expect to see heads sawed in half diagonally, shortened limbs of varying lengths, and various altered torso widths.
In the stage we played the enemy types consisted mostly of cartoonish lumberjacks as we bounded across giant logs and through wooden towns. Generally the battles seem to be paced pretty traditionally for the genre, as you enter into an arena section and have to vanquish all the foes that run at you in order to progress forward. Some enemies carry axes and guns and can be dispatched fairly quickly, but later on we battled against chainsaw-wielding foes with wooden stump helmets that took a lot more damage. Sprinkled throughout the environments were some light puzzle elements, most of which simply required the flip of a switch to solve. Hazards were everywhere, such as giant banks of circular saws and rotating razors that could kill you, or an enemy, in an instant.
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Excuse you, sir.
The stage was capped with a boss fight against a giant beaver, which took place on a floating raft. To attack, this beaver jumps up into the air and pancakes on the ground which a well-timed leap can avoid. He also spins in circles and rotates his tail around the zone of battle in an attempt to knock off whoever's in the way, which again a properly timed jump can avoid. Eventually he opens his mouth wide to yell and is vulnerable to projectiles, which in this case happen to be fish lying all over the raft. If you can launch one in, he'll vomit and then be stunned, at which point you can smack him into a set or rotating saws. Repeat this a few times and he's done.
When not out on a quest you'll find a town hub to wander around where fantasy characters mill about in front of stylized housing and you can check your progress. In various books lining the explorable area you can view statistics like number of enemies killed, deadliest combos, and most blood shed per chapter. You can also test out new weapons you get along the way and view other available quests on which to embark that includes stages with Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk themes.
From our limited time with the game it seems like good mindless fun, and the contrast of the colorful and cheery graphics with the pools of gore conjures a bit of humor value. We'll have to wait and see if the gameplay can hold up across the rest of the title's stages as Fairytale Fights' holiday season release date approaches.
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