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Fable II review

Game: Fable II
Platform: Xbox 360
Genre: Adventure (Fantasy)
Developer: Lionhead Studios

Reader review by Soulblitz

August 03, 2009

The world of Albion has changed a lot over the past 500 years, but townsfolk still talk of stories that occurred in the original game. Fable II follows a young hero on a quest to defeat a man called Lucien, who is responsible for a life-changing event very early on in the game. After this event, and 10 years later, the hero has now grown up and can finally take his revenge on Lucien. With a mysterious woman named Theresa leading the way, and his trusty dog companion by his side, is there nothing the hero can’t do? As his quest continues he learns that he is a very important Hero, and he is necessary in taking down Lucien. As well as himself, he’ll need to recruit three more Heroes (of Strength, Will and Skill) who will also use their own individual skills to help defeat Lucien.

The story itself is actually quite short (if you just rush through the game doing only the story), but it’s paced well so that it all seems to fit into place in a structured timeline. Once again Lionhead have done a great job of giving the world of Albion a unique charm that makes you want to come back. Be it the beautiful environments, the genuinely funny dialogue or the citizens of Albion themselves, the work that has been put in is clearly evident and it’s a joy to play through it. The moral choices that your character is faced with are also very interesting. One particular quest that stuck in my head was one where I ended up meeting a ghost, who was just as surprised as I was that I could see him. He loved this woman, who then ran away on their wedding day, so he sadly took his own life. It’s not done in a morbid way, so don’t let this sad story put you off. That said, he then wants you to go and find this woman, make her fall in love with you, then give her a note from the ghost telling her it was all a joke etc. You find the woman who immediately falls in love with you and it turns out she wants to marry you and have children. You then get to make the choice of giving her the note, therefore showing her it was a lie and the ghost gets his revenge. Or, you can get married to her and steal the ghosts love of his life. I won’t say what happens if you pick either choice, but the two results are very significant in relation to those two particular characters. That’s just one of the moral choices you have to make, and there are several more that you’ll have to make along your quest.

Moral choices lead us on well into a key part of the gameplay. In the original Fable you had a bar of Good/Evil, and while that’s still present in Fable II, they’ve added another bar. This bar is for Purity/Corruption, and it makes sense after reading into it. Certain acts, such as murdering citizens or letting an evil guy keep some slaves instead of setting them free, will gain Evil points, which will affect your Good/Evil bar. Others such as eating meat, drinking alcohol, or charging high rent on your real estate, will earn you Corruption points, which affect your Purity/Corruption bar. The reason for this is because there are several ways to play the game. It may be that you’d never kill anyone and you’re generally a nice person, (meaning you’re Good) but you like to get drunk and charge high rent (meaning you’re Corrupt). You could also just as easily have a completely full Evil bar, but you’re completely Pure, which to be fair is a lot less likely, but still completely possible. It adds much more depth to the morality system of the game, and ultimately it allows the player to still be Good overall but do a few bad things along the way without too much punishment, which leads to a more enjoyable experience.

The main part of the gameplay that you’ll be experiencing most however is the combat. Thankfully, while it seems simple, it’s a very effective yet rewarding system. Melee attacks are assigned to the X button, Magic attacks to B, and Ranged to Y. When you start the game your melee combos will be weak and simple, your ranged attacks will be one shot at a targeted enemy, and your magic will be very weak. To level up these skills, you’ll be killing enemies, and apart from getting Strength (melee), Skill (ranged) and Will (magic) experience, you’ll also get General experience, which can be used in conjunction with another amount of experience to make a total to learn an ability. It sounds confusing, but it’s not. Say you need 50000 total experience points to level a magic spell. It may be that you only have 20000 Will experience, but because you have 65000 general experience, you can take 30000 from the general experience and level up the magic spell. You can do this for Strength and Skill abilities as well, and by the time you max out your stats you’ll be attacking with fast fluid combos and countering enemies attacks, as well as being able to zoom in on enemies with your gun and decapitate them with the bullet, and finally your magic attacks will be devastating. The sound effects pack appropriate punch, and the animations are fluid and well done to make each confrontation as enjoyable as the next. The best thing for me though personally was finding out about decapitations. Call me violent or whatever, but it’s a lot more satisfying to shoot someone’s head clean off with a bullet than it is to simply kill them with a shot to the head.

As well as the combat, there are also lots of minigames to play throughout the world of Albion. When you’re starting out and you need a bit of cash, you can take on a series of jobs. My main income for the best part of half the game was training as a blacksmith in Bowerstone Market (the main town where you’ll spend a lot of your time). The minigames are a simple enough affair, where you need to time your pressing of the A button so that it fits into the green area of a shrinking target. It’s actually quite hard to explain, but again it’s very straight forward in practice. Most of the minigames follow this structure, and while it may get boring quickly for some, I actually found it quite fun, as bizarre as it sounds.

Arguably though, the biggest aspect of the gameplay added to Fable II is the addition of the dog. For the most part of the game, you have no choice on whether you have a dog or not. If you don’t want it, you can let it get injured in a fight and just leave it, but it’ll follow you everywhere no matter what. That’s plain cruel though, and even if you don’t want to the dog as a companion, you can still use him as a tool. He’ll bark when close to a treasure chest, and he’ll bark and try to make you follow you if he’s found a spot to dig up some treasure. I personally found it hard not to love the dog, simply because it seems so real. The animations are spot on, and the way it acts in general is how a real dog acts. People in the towns will come up to you and pet the dog, and he’ll wag his tail in delight as he chases the rubber ball you’ve thrown for him. At one point you’re running through a graveyard with some misty areas with an overall creepy feel about it. The dog will have his ears down, walk a bit slower and have his tail between his legs, and he’ll let out an occasional yelp to tell you he needs a bit of reassurance. It’s the subtle details in the dog that really make you want him around, so it seems odd when the dog occasionally glitches up and goes missing, only to arrive onscreen out of the blue.

As much as I’ve praised the game though, it eventually gets to the point in the review where I have to mention my complaints, and unfortunately, there are a few. To start, and perhaps a surprising complaint, I expected to see a lot more content than was actually present. I’d finished the main storyline, done all quests that weren’t simply to buy a property or destroy some gargoyles, and maxed out my combat stats in roughly 25 hours. That’s by no means short, but for an RPG with such great production values potential to have much more than it did, I ended up being a bit disappointed at the end of it. The only thing left to do now is to collect some silver keys, destroy a few gargoyles and get my real estate value up to 2.5 million gold. To me, none of those are particularly “fun”, and they only seem to artificially extend the life of the game by exploring environments repeatedly until you find that one key. Slow menus get a bit annoying at the start, but you’ll soon get used to it. One thing I found slightly bizarre though is the lacklustre range of clothing for your character. It may seem an odd thing to complain about, but the one move taken by the design team was that they wanted every character to look unique, so they decided to take out armour from the game so that everyone didn’t end up just buying the best stuff and leaving it at that. On the flip side though, the range of customisation in terms of clothes is quite small, thus rendering the whole idea pointless. I only found one set of clothes that made me look remotely like a warrior, with everything else making me look like a strange citizen of the town, or a nobleman; neither of which I would consider appropriate for a warrior.

Co-op play was touted to be a key part of the design process in Fable II, and while it’s a great feature in theory, in practice it falls flat on its face. To start, the camera is infuriating. The sheer fact that neither of the two participants in the game have any control over the camera whatsoever is ludicrous. One particular situation had me and a good friend playing through one of the game’s caves. When we reached the end, we had to fight a troll, and the camera managed to position itself in such a way that our two characters were facing out towards the screen and we couldn’t actually see the troll that we were supposedly killing. It was literally just our two characters shooting at something and a dog running around in circles. We then spent the best part of a minute just running around trying to make the camera move into a decent place so we could actually see what was going on. Running around in buildings is even more of a nightmare, simply because the camera can’t zoom out particularly far to try and get a good view of the scene, something which luckily it manages to do fairly well in outside environments. Secondly, despite the fuss that was made about every character being unique and being able to show it off to your friends, which only works for the host of the game. If you join someone else’s world in Fable II, you have to play as one of 6 preset henchmen, and while they may have all of your stats, the fact that you’re not actually playing as your own hero is stupid. To top it all off, the fact that the camera doesn’t move also means the distance that you can move away from each other isn’t very large at all, this makes trying to take out a group of enemies from two sides practically impossible.

One side of the game that’s all positives though is the technical aspect. Aside from the lip-syncing being a tad off (which to be fair isn’t really an issue because the camera is never close enough to character’s faces to really notice), and the odd sound not playing, the technical performance of the game is very good. During online and offline play the frame rate issues are generally stable, and I only encountered one glitch in which some text appeared as I moved to another area but didn’t disappear when I got there. This was simply remedied by moving to another area. The only other issue I had was that when in caves and tunnels, the textures on the dog can tend to change colour and/or disappear. Hardly game-breaking though to be honest, but it’s still there. Reports have been going around of lots of other bugs and glitches though, so while I didn’t personally encounter many glitches, that doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any.

Fable II is a fantastic game, and while I may have my issues with it, they are greatly outweighed by the positives. The fantastic art style, enchanting soundtrack and rewarding gameplay make for a brilliant gaming experience. The sheer amount of manpower and effort that has gone into the game is clearly evident, and it’s things like that that make you really appreciate what you’re experiencing. The dog brings a lease of life into the game that’s hard to describe, and it’s only when it isn’t there when you realise how different it is without it. It’s one of those games that doesn’t come around very often, and while it may not be perfect, it’s definitely one of the best at what it does.

Rating: 8/10

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