Many stories begin with “Once Upon a Time…..” and then are filled with lots of happiness and goodness all to end on a happy note. Well with Fairytale Fights from Playlogic those stories are turned upside down and presented in a violent blood fest. Gamers get to jump into the shoes of Little Red (Little Red Riding Hood), the Naked Emperor, Snow White or Jack (Jack and the Beanstalk). These four characters have fallen out of the spotlight and must try to get back on top by working through the land of fairytales (Taleville) and chop up everything and everyone who stands in your way.

This game is nothing more then a blood and gore filled nightmare to Walt Disney. Fairytale Fights is a very straight forward game, you start a mission walk along a rather boring linear path and hack and slash enemies, all leading to annoyingly long boss battles. While the blood and guts are quite amazing and by being presented in a Happy Tree Friends style leads to laughter, thats about all the game has to offer. Firstly just starting a mission can be a head scratcher. Instead of a menu you start in Taleville, a small little town of toonsih folk, there are buildings with books in-front of them, these books are the menus, but there’s really nothing to explain this, and they are sprawled out across the town. And the mission book is the furthest away, which for first time playing can waste 5-10 minutes of your time, once you figure out the menu you’ll be set the next time you play.
Next the controls are very simplistic, and boring. All fighting is done with the right thumbstick and again like the menus just doesn’t make sense. While I applaud developers to try to be different, if a new control scheme that breaks from the norm of fighting games is used, and used poorly it truly hurts a game. Many times I would be moving the right stick resulting in missed attacks, to many attacks causing my character to fall off an edge, and after time just gets stale. Another issue with the fighting system occurs when enemies with guns arrive, get ready to get frustrated as they will shoot you repeatedly with no real way of blocking or avoiding. The blocking system is just sad as well, theres no reason to try to block as it will have little to no effect.
Missions like I said are very straight forward, there are no alternate paths. As you make your way through the level you’ll encounter various waves of enemies, as well as other obstacles that might require the player to activate switches. After the first few the missions get boring, cause your doing the same thing over and over, and the poor fighting system makes the action repetitive, which in turn hurts the missions. The boss battles are also rather painful to play, again poor controls and a bad camera system make the boss battles annoying, and sometimes way to long.

While the games controls are rather subpar, the graphics on the other hand are very nice. The cartoon graphics covered with blood and bouncing brains is quite comical and look sharp. As you fight and deal the finishing blow to enemies there will be a quick picture-in-picture type window showing a close up of the death blow. Also as the blood piles up running through it will cause your character to slide like they are on ice. Graphically the only issue surrounds the camera, the camera is set very far back and at times takes you out of the action, a closer or even player controlled camera woul dhave helped the game feel more action packed.

Overall at first glance Fairytale Fights seems interesting, however a poor control system and repetitive gameplay leads to a boring experience. While the graphics and art direction are really great for us big kids, the blood and guts are about all this game has to offer. A better fighting system would have really helped this game out, and better paced missions and boss battle would have been very welcomed. Unless you want to live out some childhood cartoon fantasy of slaughtering Sunday Morning cartoon characters this isn’t the game for you.

*We reviewed this game on the Xbox 360 but there is little to no difference to the PS3 version.