Playlogic Games came to PAX bringing a little game with them by the name of Fairytale Fights. While it gained notoriety pre-PAX for its “Kill 1,000 children” achievement (which may or may not be in the final release of the game, I was told), Fairytale Fights supports up to four players in a hack-and-slash platforming adventure across a sugar-coated storybook land. PAX attendees got the chance to play a little bit of this upcoming title for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC, and it’s certainly a very fun experience.
Fairytale Fights puts you in the shoes of one of four characters who have lost their fame — Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Beanstalk Jack, and the Naked Emperor — in a cartoony world in peril. The four are tasked with saving their world (and in the process, rewriting their fairytale stories), destroying any and all who stand in the path of their goal. It’s not a huge story, but it sets up the game to have a ton of different enemies to hack through as you make your way through forests, candy wonderlands, and many other traditional and colorful storybook settings. Up to four players can play in offline co-op modes, with other modes including multiplayer arenas and a single-player storybook mode.
The levels themselves have plenty of platforms to navigate and pitfalls to avoid, like mousetraps and boulder-sized disco balls which will kill you in a flash. Not all of the levels are bright and cheery, but they do feature a certain cel-shaded style that feels a bit like a pop-up book. The character animations are also rather fluid and the designs are pretty cute, which is a bit deceptive as it masks the bloodiness of the game.
In addition to the four playable characters, there are a variety of other fairytale characters, from Puss N’ Boots to the Little Mermaid, that appear in the title. The demo didn’t really feature these other characters, but their inclusion hints at possible levels and maybe even some possible enemies the four main protagonists will have to face off against.
Fairytale Fights runs on Unreal Engine 3, and as such, has a few new features. The first of those is called “real-time dynamic slicing,” which allows players to slide through 3-D polygons in any number of directions and actually see their cuts affect the models in real-time, a little bit like what Dead Space was able to do. It’s not only noticeable when an enemy is running around with an arm hacked off, but it’s also a nice little aesthetic touch because it makes it seem like you are really slicing through something and not just hitting an enemy until they fall down. If you don’t believe me, wait until the first time you disembowel an enemy with an axe through the gut and see them split in half.
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