Not So Happily Ever After

Over the top gore? Bosses with excessively obvious move patterns? Ever wanted family-friendly stories told in the most family-unfriendly ways imaginable? Sign me up!

Fairytale fights is one of the best local multiplayer games released on the PlayStation 3. It stands up to the likes of the Resistance trilogy, the Call of Duty games and many others and comes out on top flaunting it’s addictive gameplay and horrible, eye-gouging camera angles.

Not being able to see anything as your character is hacked to death repeatedly by a band of lumberjacks is just the icing on the cake. When playing cooperatively, this side scrolling hack n’ slash can completely obscure the screen if you and your player 2 both get a kill worthy of a close-up. There are points in the game where you feel like quitting, the game tests you and really tries to break you. It gets repetitive, it will keep spawning you in the middle of a difficult platforming section where you’ll die the second you spawn until you reload the last checkpoint. As long as you have someone with you to laugh at your misfortune, you’ll forgive this cute little package of animated gore.

Among this blood-drenched escapade through Taleville, you encounter a large amount of different enemy types, a huge variety of weapons and unprecedented amounts of fun. The bad stuff just makes it even more hilarious as you pull off a special Glory Mode attack, hitting a rabbit in slow motion just to watch it flop over as it squeaks like a fresh oiled hinge.

The story makes no sense at all, a new character in town is stealing all of your fame in order to write you out of your own fairytales, swooping in at the last minute to steal your thunder, taking all the credit for himself. Of course this leads to a final showdown, which considering you can infinitely respawn for a small amount of coins makes for more annoyance than difficulty.

The weapons have a star system with 1 star being the worst and 5 being the best, ranging from twigs to sickles, giant scissors to broadswords. It’s definitely what a lot of the development focused on, as other than the weapons the game feels glued together and disjointed, leaving you yearning for something more, but also laughing yourself to death.

The NPCs in the game include rats, beavers, lumberjacks, rabbits, gingerbread men, wolves and so many more. You have to take on bosses like Pinocchio and the Pied Piper. This game had so much potential to be something other than a critically-panned attempt at mixing dark humour with bedtime stories, unfortunately it missed the mark and resulted in the developer Hydravision Entertainment closing its doors.

At the end of the day, this isn’t the next Little Big Planet or God of War (even if the beaver boss could pass for GoW’s Hades), but it’s a great blend of two already established ideas in a concept that’s hard to pull off, and even harder to beat.

Conclusion

‘Not quite hell, but you’re on the right path’