I played this for 15 minutes and beat it on normal mode.
Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown is an attempt at a fighting game for the GBC. You can select a character from a roster of the more notable characters in the first film. There are three modes of difficulty: easy, medium and hard.
Unfortunately, Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown fails in every aspect of its design. I am going to chalk this up to a similar issue with IP licensed titles and assume the dev team had to rush this one out asap to coincide with the release window of one of the film's.
At the outset, the game asks you to select your preferred language and there is both "English" and "American" amongst other languages. So we are off to an interesting start.
The readability of the artwork is a complete disaster. A Lot of the time, it's difficult to understand what is and isn't a platform, where a platform ends and a death pit starts. Furthermore, what is in the background or foreground blends together because the artist(s) weren't able to define the art elements related to each design element and separate them out. This lack of readability results in infuriating falls into death pits while fighting, for example. Black outlines are your friend when designing pixel art elements in games. As is the use of dropping the saturation of colors to make the background recede, separating it from mid and foreground elements. Both of these additions would have made my experience at least a little more tolerable.
The characters are slow and lumbering to control if you want to move them around without jumping. The AI is baffling. At one point I was fighting Shrek and he just decided to jump right into a death pit after farting on me, killing himself instantly.
Some of the fighting moves are interesting enough, as I said Shrek can fart on his opponents, for example. But there really isn't any strategy to found here. The best course of action is spamming a simple punch or kick attack until you win. That's how I beat the game actually. I managed to pin Lord Farquad (the final Boss) into a corner by stun-locking him with repeated kicks.
There are some characters you can unlock by beating them in tournament mode. The Ginger Bread Man runs around on candy cane sticks and his head-butt animation is great in a good-bad way.
I actually kind of love the title screen because it's a crusty looking Shrek about to thunderclap some guys head to smithereens. And the Champion Plaque is absolute gold if you manage to make it to the single player modes end screen as the titular Shrek. So that's legit worth 10 mins of your time.
Trying to make a good fighting game on the Game Boy or Game Boy Color is no easy task. I think it's best left to the consoles where you can hold a controller rather than the handheld itself. I would love to be proven wrong...
Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown is an attempt at a fighting game for the GBC. You can select a character from a roster of the more notable characters in the first film. There are three modes of difficulty: easy, medium and hard.
Unfortunately, Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown fails in every aspect of its design. I am going to chalk this up to a similar issue with IP licensed titles and assume the dev team had to rush this one out asap to coincide with the release window of one of the film's.
At the outset, the game asks you to select your preferred language and there is both "English" and "American" amongst other languages. So we are off to an interesting start.
The readability of the artwork is a complete disaster. A Lot of the time, it's difficult to understand what is and isn't a platform, where a platform ends and a death pit starts. Furthermore, what is in the background or foreground blends together because the artist(s) weren't able to define the art elements related to each design element and separate them out. This lack of readability results in infuriating falls into death pits while fighting, for example. Black outlines are your friend when designing pixel art elements in games. As is the use of dropping the saturation of colors to make the background recede, separating it from mid and foreground elements. Both of these additions would have made my experience at least a little more tolerable.
The characters are slow and lumbering to control if you want to move them around without jumping. The AI is baffling. At one point I was fighting Shrek and he just decided to jump right into a death pit after farting on me, killing himself instantly.
Some of the fighting moves are interesting enough, as I said Shrek can fart on his opponents, for example. But there really isn't any strategy to found here. The best course of action is spamming a simple punch or kick attack until you win. That's how I beat the game actually. I managed to pin Lord Farquad (the final Boss) into a corner by stun-locking him with repeated kicks.
There are some characters you can unlock by beating them in tournament mode. The Ginger Bread Man runs around on candy cane sticks and his head-butt animation is great in a good-bad way.
I actually kind of love the title screen because it's a crusty looking Shrek about to thunderclap some guys head to smithereens. And the Champion Plaque is absolute gold if you manage to make it to the single player modes end screen as the titular Shrek. So that's legit worth 10 mins of your time.
Trying to make a good fighting game on the Game Boy or Game Boy Color is no easy task. I think it's best left to the consoles where you can hold a controller rather than the handheld itself. I would love to be proven wrong...