Bet you can guess which end of the spectrum I am at
There is so much to like about Fable II from a design aspect. The quirky world of Peter Molyneux is rich with little details that make it an interesting one to explore, but the story completely falls flat remaining uninteresting throughout the course of the main campaign. For a game that claims its a Fable right in the title, it completely fails. Rather this game should be re-dubbed with a more appropriate title such as “Medieval Retaliator Simulator”.
Story: As I stated before, for a game that boldly titles itself as a Fable, it certainly does not deliver on the claim. The story begins in the world of Albion, shortly before your sister is murdered, and you along with her, or so the villain believes. M from MI6 takes you in and heals you allowing you to grow up in her camp until the day you are ready to begin your quest for revenge and in some sense to save the world. Along the way you will meet and recruit other members of the sacred club that you were born into to take on Lord Lucien. To be quite honest, I lost interest shortly after meeting the first “Hero” Sister Hannah as the plot had already fell apart by that time. Suffice to say if your looking for a deep involved quest that might move you or even keep your interest, look elsewhere.
Presentation: The game is all over the place visually. Most of the time, it has a clean “Harry Potter” aesthetic when in towns and villages. The forest’s and meadows are bright shades of green which glow at night. Caves are well lit making navigation typically a synch. Overall the lighting is bright, much brighter than what is the defacto norm in this generation of consoles. All characters and enemies have a cartoonish style to them which fits the world perfectly, along with some quirky characters. The design and style are all well fine and good, but the hardware itself has alot of trouble keeping up with it. The framerate is never consistent, ever often
I own this town, you pay me rent
causing screen tear and odd slowness. The particle effects are nice, but at times, it seems a two dimensional animation is used to keep from having to render certain effects specifically when collecting experience orbs. The water does not move nor look realistic at all, with some very ugly slash effects when entering or exiting water. It all is very inconsistent and hurts the experience even further with its weak writing. My biggest complaint resides with the systems slow and often poorly implemented user interface. I found scrolling through the menu’s to be slow enough to be irritating but not completely broken. Menu descriptions and placement of inventory just seems needlessly complex and over thought at points. Unfortunately you will find yourself using the menu alot as with any Action Adventure RPG, which just solidifies my complaints even further. Along with a slow UI system, the game load times themselves are often extremely slow as well to the point that I thought a few times the box had locked up. This alone is problematic as every area requires being loaded, there is little to no streaming load sequences between areas and parts of the city possibly due to the hardware being underpowered, or just pure shotty programing. Whatever the case maybe, this can definitely be considered a throwback style of level handling to the PS1/PS2 days. If Rockstar could do it, so should every other developer at this point. The best looking parts of the game mostly reside in the Magic effects which are fairly impressive. Lots of bloom lighting and particles, but as you may suspect kill the framerate even further.
Hark! Bandits!
Gameplay: So for a game with a weak narrative and a poor framerate you would expect that the gameplay had better hold up right? Well my friends it is just as weak as every other aspect of the game.First we will start with the meat and potatoes of the game; the combat. For the most part physical melee attacks are really no better than a third rate hack and slash game. You have the option of using long range weapons in combat as well making this almost an arcade shooter with slow-as-hell reloading (Until you level up of course). Thirdly you have the option of using Magic, which until you level up does not have nearly the same stopping power as the Sword or Gun. Magic eventually can be leveled to charge up with a variety of effects, which than can be used to combo a ranged attach and a melee attack. As complex as this may get, it never is any fun, and dealing with groups when using a Sword or gun typically result in your having a blade through your nose. You get stuck in using the same tactics usually over and over again which consist of charge lightning until group is in range, fire gun once, slash everyone until dead. most of the spells are useless until you bring them to level two. Speaking of leveling up and poor UI design, there is no real clear way of knowing how much XP you have available to upgrade a skill or spell. You collect experience orbs from both attacking and killing which fit into three categories of physical, ranged, magic, and general. The system used to calculate how much is available for each type is a convoluted mess that becomes a guessing game of pressing “Level Up” and hoping you have enough. Aside from poor combat, their are minigames in the way of jobs which you use to collect money. You can marry women or men by wooing them with your character, which is entertaining for the first five minutes, but becomes old quickly after. You can buy, rent and own property which for me was a big crux as I wanted to own the entire city and make everyone pay me. There is a great system that collects rent from your tenants and businesses every five minutes, and continues to do so even if your offline. When you return from a long break of playing Fable two, you will collect the sum of money from your tenants since the last playtime logged in your save file, so collecting cash and then spending it on new property can be slightly addicting. From a gameplay perspective, my favorite thing about Fable II on the whole is the ability to be incredibly evil at nearly anytime. First chance I got, I took my sword to every civilian in the city that I could, however that also brought along the city guards who were tough for my low level character. Currently I can take them out with little issues, problem is they keep on coming. As with the original Fable, being evil changes your appearance so that you look more like your Karma, so my character looks like a Mini Demon.
Fan Reaction
Special: Fable II offers a local and online co-op mode, unfortunately the co-op player cannot use their Fable II character and will gain no experience from the play through, however they do get any gold or Xbox Live Achievements you may unlock or collect. Fable II also has a few expansion packs as well as a XBLA Arcade game that was released prior to the games release allowing players to earn massive amounts of gold that would import into the game. I doubt I will be reviewing any of those however myself, its not interesting enough to continue with. The game can be found for $30 as a Platinum hit release and even cheaper used. The game is, however, fairly easy on collecting Xbox Live Achievement points.
Conclusion: The reason I bought my second Xbox 360 was to play this game, and boy did it NOT deliver in nearly anyway. Id say this was an easy pass unless you have an unnatural love of being evil and owning virtual property.
Fable II (X360) is a ** out of 5
By: Bobby Major
