10th Dec, 2022
Sometimes game developers just like to mess with us and our childhood memories. Many of you probably grew up with tales of characters like Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and The Naked Emperor. Well, how would you feel if you saw those beloved childhood icons of yours engaged in a bloody, over the top action game where they hack and slash through a fairytale world?
Gameplay
Because, basically, that's what Fairytale Fights is all about. You get to pick one of several well-known fairytale characters, and lead them on a quest with a background story that ties everything to the world of fairytales and magic almost perfectly.
The story involves a stolen magical kettle which you must recover, and the game takes you through a wide variety of settings, giving you opportunity to not only let yourself loose with whatever fighting style you prefer (the combat is quite varied here), but also throwing in a good number of platformer-style puzzles for good measure.
The control scheme could use a slight improvement, as we noticed the infamous “skateboard effect” a few times – your character becomes a bit harder to control for smaller, more precise movements like edging along a platform.
This can lead to some irritating moments when you're trying to jump over a death pit or another lethal trap, as a wrongly recognized input can spell your certain doom. On the other hand, the controls accommodate for the fast-paced gameplay very nicely, and fighting seems easier than in other games we'd played.
Graphics and System Requirements
Fairytale Fights wouldn't have been so unique and memorable it it hadn't been for its art style. The game is designed in a very creative way – you can instantly recognize any of the popular fairytale characters you'll be encountering, while on the other hand they've got a sinister note to them that tells you they're not the lovable guys you remember from your childhood books. On top of all, the game actually uses the Unreal Engine 3, so the quality of the graphics is top notch from a technical standpoint as well.
Despite using the UE3, it's not really resource-intensive, and should run smoothly on computer that otherwise struggle with UE3 games. The characters have been done with fewer polygons than the highly-detailed soldier models you'd get from, say, Unreal 3 itself, so there's not that much data for your computer to process at any given time.
Other
Fairytale fights also offers a multiplayer option though we couldn't get to test it extensively – what we did see, though, was a finely-balanced gameplay that only suffered from a few minor lag issues, and otherwise seemed like a great dose of fun.
Conclusion
A few hours with Fairytale Fights will be enough to prevent you from ever looking at your favorite fairytale characters in the same way again – yet if you love stylized violence and dark humor games, you'll probably get to love those characters even more!