Punch Upon a Time Fairy tales settle it with fists

The main mode drops your team of three onto a sky galleon, your home base floating above three rival squads. Between rounds you talk strategy with your squad: which minigame to queue for, which pocket item to carry into the next match. Win fights and you damage the enemy galleons; the last squad flying wins the whole saga.

Each round is drawn at random from a huge pool of modes, so one saga might have you dunking on the competition in a game of Basketball, freezing in place during Red-Light-Green-Light, or hunting down the enemy monarch in Long Live the King. No two sagas play the same, which keeps every session feeling fresh.

Twelve legends from fairy tales and fables are up for a scrap, heroes and villains alike, plus one adorable little frog for when you would rather be cute than legendary. The fairy tale angle does real work here: everyone already knows who these characters are, so picking your main is half the fun before the first punch lands.

The characters play differently from each other, and with 40+ modes to test them in, each one gets a chance to show what it can do. Light characters dart around while heavies hit like a cartload of bricks, so there is a pick for every temperament, from careful pokers to full-time brawlers.

This is a party game at heart, and it shows in the details. Items are strong and plentiful, with 40+ of them to clobber and befuzzle opponents, which keeps the field level even when one friend has hundreds of hours in platform fighters and another has none. Taunting is always one button away, and the slapstick moments it produces are half the reason to play.

Rounds are short, the rules of each minigame take seconds to explain, and with 12-player online rollback netcode, in-game voice chat, matchmaking and custom lobbies, getting a full table of friends into one match is painless. The laughs come from the chaos, and there is plenty of it.