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Bloody Red Riding Hood
Product: Fairytale Fights
Company: Playlogic
Date: 06/10/2009
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What do you get when you have a world of fairytale characters that get board and decide to go on adventures, and have no compunction against using weapons like swords, axes and various blunt objects all wrapped in a early strange cartoony package? Playlogic's Fairytale Fights, that's what.

The game will feature four playable characters (of which only Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella have been announced), and an abundance of other classical characters as NPCs. From what I gathered, the basic premise was that the fairytale world has become a bit of a boring place. You play one of four "has-been characters" who have gotten into a bit of a rut and have decided to fix the problems with their world to restore it to its full glory. One mission involved the lumberjacks of the world feeling unappreciated for all of their hard work. So you are supposed to work your way to the head-lumberjack and talk things out. But it seems like his minions weren't too keen on that idea since they came at us in waves, and their axes were sharp. But that was okay, because not only does the game allow the players to pick up tons of other weapons, but their own axes as well, and swinging those sharp implements around the screen allowed Little Red to chop down many a lumberjack.

The game's fighting mechanic seems to be one of the more unusual parts about Fairytale Fights. You run around the game's 2D plane with the Left Analog Stick, but you use the Right one as if you are swinging your arms about with the weapon in hand. The result of this is that when you make the fatal cut on an enemy, you will end up slicing them at odd angles, and the game's split-screen, close-up view of these final cuts just helps to show that fact. When you deal massive damage and split an enemy in twain, the body is sliced at the exact angle you swung your weapon. This is done by a new "Dynamic Slicing" system developed by Playlogic for this exact effect. That's right, no pre-defined death animations or generic heads lobbed off, what you cut is what you see. And the result of these bi-sections is a lot of blood on the level floor. So much so, that it will actually get a bit slippery for the characters.

This new brand of Fairytale violence is expected to hit the streets at the end of 2009 for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, and while it looks like a little cartoony side-scrolling game, it does utilize the Unreal 3 Engine under the hood, so you PC gamers out there might have to check on your system's stats before delving into this bloody, but cute, game.

J.R. Nip aka Chris Meyer

GameVortex PSIllustrated