Not quite there: Fairytale Fights

Dutch game developer Playlogic Games’ new title Fairytale fights certainly was a game that managed to catch our attention at GamesCom last year. I mean mix Fairytales with “kiddy” visuals, throw in some Happy Tree Friends and you’re sure to get some attention. So after our positive first impression at GC, we were pretty eager to spend some time with the game.

Roughly 4 months later and you can find the game on shelves at your local videogame retailer, so we figured it was about time to finally play through the full version.

Fairytale rights is a fantasy hack and slash game, released for windows computers, playstation3 and xbox 360 and has received the PEGI 16, and ESRB Mature ratings in europe and the US respectively (click on the ratings to view game-specific rating details). Having played the game extensively, I would highly recommend parents to not let kids below that age to play it. Now with that out of the way, let’s talk gameplay.

Right off the bat I just couldn’t resist checking the credits, and sure enough, some ten or so familiar names popped up, even putting our university in the credits. Pretty neat!

When you first pop the game into your system and start playing you immediately notice the rich color scheme and fun re-imagining of a range of fairytale characters that we’ve all come to love when we were little. But this game is far from intended for the disney crowd, instead going with bucketloads of blood and mindless violence. But hey, with the box art of this game, nobody should be surprised by that!

Our first impression was still the same as it was back on GamesCom (a hack and slash game, drawing inspiration from happy tree friends and fairy tales), so we skipped straight through the mandatory intro screens and set off to hurt anything that moved.

I’d say the single player mode took us about 20 hours to complete. You can also play through the “story” in online mode, effectively creating a 4-player co-op game, or do the same using the offline multiplayer co-op mode. The game also offers an on-, and offline multiplayer battle mode, allowing players to fight Vs. each other, but we found this mode of play to be fairly useless and much less fun than the story mode since there is no end to the battle, nor does it matter wether or not you kill a friend. I felt the multiplayer battle mode had potential but left much to be desired.

Going through the story mode, you are presented with a wide variety of weaponry, ranging from a lollypop to a tree branch, to a big axe. These can be picked up from beaten enemies or.. just about anywhere in the game, seeing as it’s literally filled with item and money chests, ready for you to be raided. After a while though, we started getting annoyed with them since there were simply so many and we stopped bothering to open them apart for grabbing a new weapon.

Wielding one of these many weapons, the player goes though a series of tales as they slay lumberjacks, gingerbread men, even leprechauns. The environments in FTF look great, all fit with the story you’re playing in, and the way they throw in some neat little details add to the impression of the game’s level design in a positive sense.

Sadly, not all is well in fairy tale land, because for some reason Playlogic decided it was a good idea to leave out the invisible walls we’ve all grown so accustomed to in other games, and in this case, that decision was a mistake. The problem is that you can easily walk off the level, get beaten off it by an enemy, or (thats a bit uncommon, but it happened to us) get stuck in the level geometry.

The level design is also set up in a way that frequently makes it difficult to estimate just where you’re going to land when you jump, resulting in us unintentionally jumping off the level several times in a row, falling off narrow ledges and other objects.

As we sliced our way though the world of FTF, we often pondered the question where they hid variety. You see, from the first to the last, including bosses, all you do is walk, slice, fall of level, re-spawn, and repeat that endlessly. About halfway through the game we ran across a maze, but thats about the only bit of variety we can recall in the entire game.

The game is set up as a number of fairy tales, each with a set of chapters with a boss battle looming at the end. Sadly, we found these battles, and the game’s difficulty, for that matter, to be consistently disappointing. The fighting doesn’t get any harder as you progress through the game, and the boss battles are either fun but extremely short and simple, or straight forward but too long and repetitive, and thous, boring.

Recap

The humor and fun details in the game add to the fun atmosphere that FTF has going on, and the graphics only add to this. However, the sheer amount of times we’ve frustratingly simply fell off the levels for no good reason, and the fact hat the amount of time we’ve died that way was roughly equal to the amount of enemy lives we took, definitely took away (in a big way) from any enjoyment of playing FTF.

If we add everything up, I’d say FTF is a game that had a lot of potential, but feels rushed and even though there are some very nice levels, overall, it could use some extra attention to the leveldesign.

FTF, for these reasons feels more like a downloadable PSN or Xbox Live Arcade game you’d buy for €9,99, rather than a full-blown €50 title. The game concept is nice, but it’s execution is lacking and disappointing, sadly.