Fairytale Fights is an action game that puts an emphasis on slicing lumberjacks, gingerbread men, rabbits, wolves, mice, and other storybook characters into messy little pieces as gallons of blood spill on the ground. So perhaps, in a twisted way, it's appropriate that the gameplay feels sloppy and the experience of playing the game is nothing short of painful.

You start your terrible trek in Taleville, playing as one of four famous fairy-tale characters: Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, the naked emperor, or Jack (of Jack and the Beanstalk fame). Now forgotten after being usurped from the leading role in each of their stories, they set off to make names for themselves again by undertaking a quest to recover a stolen magical kettle. It may take its inspiration from many classic stories, but if you go into this game expecting a tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm, you'll be deeply disappointed. The story is paper-thin and serves only as the flimsiest pretense to bring you face-to-face with Pinocchio, the Pied Piper, and other famous fairy-tale personages.

In each linear level, you run along a set path through forests, candy castles, quaint hamlets, and other storybook settings. You'll occasionally need to make tricky jumps over spinning blades or onto moving platforms, but the controls aren't tight enough to make this maneuvering enjoyable. The camera also maintains too great a distance from the action at times, making it difficult to tell just when you should leap to land on that drifting log or rotating waterwheel. But the platforming is a minor part of the experience. By far the majority of your time will be spent killing off the waves of enemies that hinder your progress. To attack, you move the right thumbstick in any direction. To chain attacks together, you just keep wobbling the thumbstick, and to charge attacks, you hold the thumbstick in one direction and then quickly push it in another. The gameplay isn't just shallow; it's also sloppy and imprecise, feeling largely disconnected from your actions, and as a result, it's thoroughly uninvolving. You can't effectively target specific enemies, and there's no meaningful variety to your attacks. All you can do is move the right thumbstick around wildly to pummel your attackers. The lack of control also leads to other frustrations. If you're unleashing attacks anywhere near an edge, it's very easy for your character's combo to carry you right off of it to your death.

Not that this matters at all. The only penalty for death is the loss of a portion of the money you've gathered from chests and defeated enemies on that level. But since the only thing money is good for is the completely unimportant funding of a statue of your character in Taleville, losing it is of no real consequence. That doesn't mean that dying can't get annoying, though. Particularly on the hard difficulty level, there may be times when the instant you respawn, you're mobbed by so many foes that you barely have time to get an attack in before you've been ripped to shreds and need to respawn again. There's nothing satisfying about this kind of difficulty, though. Since there's no depth to the gameplay, there's no skillful way to respond to these kinds of situations. It's just frustrating.

Hate blood and gore? This isn't the game for you! Love blood and gore? Still not the game for you!

Gore is the gimmick with which the game tries to distract you from its shallowness and repetition. Scattered throughout each level are blunt and sharp objects you can wield as weapons. These include axes, clubs, swordfish, swordfish skeletons, rulers, waffle irons, lollipops, rolling pins, pitchforks, and bratwurst. Each weapon has an effectiveness rating in stars or skulls, but for all that variety, there's no real difference in how one sharp weapon or one blunt weapon behaves compared to any other. Blunt weapons are particularly useful with charge attacks, while sharp weapons are particularly useful when you want to cut your enemies to pieces and spill blood everywhere. Once that blood has been spilled, you can slide around on it like a skater on ice, and if your glory bar is fully charged, you can perform a glory attack in which your character dismembers an enemy with movements that match your inputs with the thumbstick. All this gleeful grisliness may be good for a laugh in the first few minutes, but it's quickly overshadowed by the crushing boredom of the gameplay. There are also ranged weapons, such as blunderbusses and candy guns, that you can pick up, but the inability to aim with any precision limits both their effectiveness and the enjoyment you're likely to get from them.