Anyone who has peeled back the shabby corners of some of the best loved fairy stories will know the true, dark depths that lay beneath and the twisted idea of what once passed for happily ever after. Eschewing the modern, demure approach to these tales, Playlogic swings an axe at all things saccharine and serene and in bulging-eyed style, takes no prisoners.

Boasting ‘gallons of blood’ and ‘dynamic slicing’, Fairytale Fights, despite its deceptive look, is no jolly picnic through a happy fairytale land.  Indeed, our four heroes, Jack (Mr Beanstalk), the Naked Emperor, Little Red Riding Hood, and Snow White are all painted as slightly warped, twitchy, trigger happy lunatics, whose stories risk fading from memory as the new kid in town schmoozes his way into people’s fickle affections. 

With a pristine tunic and golden hair, the Little Tailor has taken over the stories of our ‘insignificant’  heroes and won the hearts and simple minds of Taleville’s people with his jaunty but underhanded exploits.  With their fame fading, what can our four do but reclaim their glory  with a healthy dose of visceral slaughter and mayhem underwritten by the flimsy excuse of pursuing porridge kettles and kidnapped, narcoleptic princesses.  No bunny, buxom wench, or golden haired child is safe from the slicing, bludgeoning carnage -  just as it should be.

Scooping the prize for unlikeliest use of the Unreal Engine this decade, Fairytale Fights eschews the greys and gunmetals that traditionally go with the sort of games which utilise this workhorse and has instead conjured a lush world with a vivid palette of colours that wouldn’t look out of place in a traditional Nintendo offering.  Unlike anything really seen on the Xbox before, (with a few, more peaceful exceptions), this game boasts an engaging concept and a wealth of colourful, innovative backdrops and rich, imaginative levels, not to mention blood by the bucket load.  Primary colours and cutesy character may be the order of the day, but the twisted way in which the game delivers these things is a fiendish, hand rubbing delight and this contrast is rarely less than satisfying.

The humour on display here is delightful, from blink and miss moments in the background, to the achievements, such as slaughtering 7 dwarves while playing as Snow White for the ‘That’s Gratitude’ achievement.  The array of weapons is vast and you haven’t lived until you have pummelled a prince to death with a violin or melted enemies by vomiting acid over them.  The weapons range from the deadly and bizarre ‘Spoon of Destruction’ and ‘Twig of Destiny’, to the surreal ‘Marshmallow on a Stick’, ‘Beaver Mailbox’, and a ‘Waffle Iron’.  If you should find yourself short handed, grabbing a nearby gnome, bunny, or rat will serve as a useful weapon until something better comes along.  The twee colours don’t, for one moment, mask the dark humour, meaning that blended princesses, incinerated children and arguably one of the greatest looking bosses in the form of a stitched, conjoined Hansel and Gretel, give this game some great moments.  And it needs them, because the problems are legion.

Painful landings await...

There are many good elements to Fairytale Fights, but in reality, the basic things that it claims to be are a let down and the deceptive backdrops belie the game’s actually rather disappointing and limited feeling, side-scrolling nature.  The hack and slash element is maniac and fun until you run into clusters of enemies whose attacks decimate your health in one combo, leaving you stunned and unable to respond for another salvo, resulting in several deaths before you can extricate yourself.  Bad respawns cause more deaths than they should and if you find yourself sans weapon at some of the stickier points, progress will be excruciatingly painful.

Similarly, the platforming elements are very much hit and miss.  On one hand, the theory is fantastic, with some engaging and imaginative recipes for great platforming, such as traversing deadly saw-blades, escaping a crumbling candy castle while pursued by gingerbread men, and navigating some fantastic shelves of bric-a-brac in the Giant’s house. However, the stubborn camera fully intends to disrupt any progress as much as it can with it’s obtuse angles making judging depth a nightmare, leading to far more money haemorrhaging deaths than is reasonable.  Boss battles swing from the oddly easy to the bewildering to the hair ripping variety and are one sly way in which the game robs you of your carefully collected horde of gems and riches, meaning that when you limp forlornly back to the hubland and open your bloodstained purse, you realise that the upgrades for your illustrious statue will have to wait.  For a very long time. 

Got Listerine?

Given the game’s lack of similar competition and aforementioned plus points, it is easy to find certain problems forgivable, especially given the fun to be had in local multiplayer.  However, Fairytale Fights seems to have reserved it’s worst for the ultimate kick in the throat.

A significant number of achievements are glitched, some irreparably so until a patch arrives – in fact, I have never known of a game with this many issues right off the bat.  Multiplayer over Live is virtually unplayable, with vanishing characters, invisible enemies, terminal slow down, disappearing weapons, and game crashing chaos conspiring against you.  Also, should you have made the quite reasonable error of completing the single player campaigns first (the difficulties don’t stack I’m sorry to say), then thanks to a shocking glitch, you will have rendered yourself unable to pop the multiplayer completion achievements…something that if you are unlucky, you will have only discovered after several arse numbing playthroughs at six plus hours each.

A few more months tacked onto the release date might have allowed these problems to be caught, but as it is, they are a very glaring stain on what should be an entertaining and unique romp.  If the rumours are correct, then several last minutes changes were made to bring the game into line with its desired age ranking, (not least the amusing but predictably kneejerk garnering ‘kill 1000 children’ achievement), which is possibly a contributing factor to the oddly long glitch list.

Goose thief and slaughter-monger, Jack spills some claret

When all is said, done, and slaughtered, Playlogic have created an entertaining game, full of cartoony character and over the top, blood drenched action, but the flaws and bugs mar this twisted delight in a very off-putting way which is a crying shame.  Only the patient and fearless will pursue this game to the bitter end of an as-of-yet, elusive maximum gamerscore and although Playlogic have announced free DLC with up to four new characters promised, I fear that much of their audience have already hung up their Rainbow Swords and gone home.

Summary

Full of character and colour, this game, despite being a great concept with a dose of dark humour, doesn’t quite make the ‘better than average’ ground that it perhaps should have, thanks to a myriad of problems and an unforgiveable list of glitches.  Flaws aside, until it gets the patch it so desperately needs, Fairytale Fights certainly won’t have a happily ever after and that’s a real shame.

Ever since having my interest piqued at the Ready Up World record attempt back in April, I’ve sunk my time into the game, allowing it to snatch my evenings and consume my weekends while my gamerscore slowly gained a rosy glow under the drip feed of achievements.  To be honest, at first, the game was merely a taste to show support for those playing through 24 hours – after all, driving games had never interested me and cars ‘aren’t my thing’.  All talk of torque leaves me scratching my arse and wishing the Top Gear crew would skip to whatever caravan demolition derby or race that they have planned for this week.  But something strange actually happened here…Burnout Paradise sucked me in within moments and I soon realised that this ‘mere driving game’ was so much more than I had dismissively branded it.  It became indelibly stamped upon my gaming consciousness.

The free-roaming style of the gorgeous open city and surrounds absorbed me with its  events at every junction, enticing smashables, and different gameplay which, instead of having the driver loop tedious tracks, encouraged free choice, exploration, and served the city up as a playground to game or cruise in.  It rewarded the player for not only venturing off the beaten track and testing the hidden nooks and delights, but for being as anti-social as they felt like.

...and a predatory metallic black by night

Online play has typically been something that I have also avoided, muttering endlessly about ‘online achievements’ and ‘unnecessary multiplayer modes’, but again, this game forced me out of my shell of hermitude and into endless online freeburns where challenges were knocked down and the general chaos of the squealing metal free-for-all smashes were the order of the day…and night, and weekend, and holiday until it was all I played, talked about, and saw every time I closed my eyes.

Paradise City began to enslave my soul, haunting my dreams with angry boost bars, tumbling smash gates, and endless, winding tarmac.  Every night, I prowled the foggy streets like a killer with a steel chassis as my frock coat and four Criterion tyres as my tools of evisceration.  Innocent gates cowered beneath my beams and fell even swifter beneath my wheels, while I surveyed the rising body count with twisted euphoria.  Blue jump lights drew my obsessive attention, luring me into alleys and onto dimly lit boardwalks with the promise of orgasmic heights and I was never disappointed…they too succumbed to my urge to claim and collect, the lights laying haphazardly at the scene of the crime while the city swallowed my fleeing predator.

'scuse me love, have you seen a billboard around here?

One of those rare moments was forming where that elusive alchemy between game and achievements was discovered, as progress was rewarded without the game becoming a chore.  It was as well balanced as the tyres on my rebellious Dodge Charger…sorry…’Bootlegger’.  And that’s something else that began to warp and change…words began tumbling from my mouth like a sorcerer’s ribbons…I began bitching about ‘oversteer’, ‘cornering’, and ‘how tight’ something handles.  As the Burning Routes began too, to fall like dominos beneath my relentless determination, I sampled more and more vehicles and the complaints began to come thick and fast… one particularly shitty vehicle ‘handling like a morgue on wheels’ and another committing the crime of being ‘as responsive as a decomposed corpse.’  All this from a darkly dreaming gamer who for months couldn’t even work out how to get onto the damned I88.

Jack and Rosco, the last of the trio who helped me become 'Elite'

Fellow carnage creators and hunters often kept pace with me during those evenings, weekends, and marathon sessions, ripping up the streets, working on achievements and challenges, all the while taunting, laughing, crashing.  Every player seemed to have their favoured tool of choice…The Rook with his Carbon GT Concept leading the way to every challenge like Gandalf for the rest of our questing pack or Libitina’s lethal Peggles…a sadistic pink wrecking ball from hell that shunted many a fearful vehicle into the jaws of oblivion.  That was until Arkham Asylum’s eerie corridors lured them away and the streets of Paradise were lost…and with the lone game as complete as it could be with the reward of my Criterion Elite license, I felt the same way.

A recent visit re-confirmed the odd feeling.  With the smashes gone, the billboards wrecked, and the roads ruled, coupled with the natural migration of fellow gamers and the last proud achievement tucked away, Paradise City is slightly emptier now. Slightly sadder.  For a game that truly captured my time and enthusiasm enough for me to sink endless hours, week after week into it, in a genre that I had never looked twice at, it is quite an achievement that I feel mournful as much as elated…and for all 60 of those achievements, that bauble-less one is perhaps the most impressive.

And yes, I did feel the need to cheat because I was too impatient to realise that there was a far easier way of getting the ‘Too Fast’ achievement.  In order to solve the puzzle in the stupid time limit and after many obscenities, I cunningly switched tactics.  I used my digital camera to photograph the grid off the telly.  I then paused the game so that I could work it out on paper and then un-pause and input the answers.  And I still couldn’t get them all in in time.  After several attempts and an embarrassing explanation when the o/h asked just what the hell I was doing, I realised I could simply switch to the advanced fast controls and use the auto-pencil thing.  All this for 20 gamer points.

Sad though it may be, I was very chuffed with myself -  until the dark cloud started to spread when I thought of the tuts about cheating that I had levied at my father.  The man that got me into gaming with my first Speccy and a copy of Booty and Chuckie Egg, sadly rarely ever games any more, but when he does, he may as well not.  He is utterly shameless.

My case in point: after much convincing and nagging, I persuaded him to play Commandos for the PC – a game I love and have been playing on and off for years and years, but never completed due to save game errors, lost files, computer changes, and bone-idleness.  “Give it a go”, I said, you’ll love it.  “It’s quite hard”, I told him, but it’s war stuff and you can cut people’s throats and hide in the snow etc.  Interest was piqued and he grudgingly relented.  I sat back and smiled at the sounds of gunfire and various ‘Guten Tags’ emanating from his room for several evenings before deciding to see how he was getting on.

Me - “How you doing?”
Him - “I’m on that level where you have to assassinate that bloke.”  I freeze.
Me - “Erm…what?!”
Him - “Yeah, it’s a bit of a bastard.”

That’s the level I’m on.  Me.  After years of on/off play.  How could this be? I panic.  He isn’t even much of a gamer and has the attention span of a concussed goldfish.  Like discovering a squishy blister, I just couldn’t leave it alone.

Me - “How the hell did you manage to get that far.”  I try to hide my incredulity.  Am I such a crap gamer that he is outstripping me?
Him - “I used a cheat that gave me infinite sniper bullets.”  He announces, supremely pleased with himself.  I nearly choke.
Me - “What?  But you can’t do that!  It’s cheating.”
Him - “Well I did.”
Me - “But it’s cheating.”
Him - “So?” Looks more pleased.

I don’t believe him.  I shake my head and walk away, suddenly remembering why I don’t buy him games anymore.  I’d never do anything like that, I puff to myself. I feel slightly miffed that the strategising required had been so gleefully trampled over and that he was so chuffed with himself.  So was I the other night though, and there lies the rub.

Commandos doesn’t have gamerpoints and those twisted little numbers do strange things to the lines we have drawn for ourselves sometimes.  Clutching my camera in my fist two nights ago, surrounded by scribbled grids, and trying to solve the last few numbers on Buku Sudoko, I suddenly realised…I am just like him.  A dirty cheater.  But wait…no, hang on.  No, I won’t and can’t accept that.  Innovator.  Yes, a dirty innovator.  I still hold myself away from his level by a desperate thread though, so I guess that makes me a hypocrite too.