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Review

Release Date: 10.21.2008
Platform: Xbox 360
Developer: Big Blue Box Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Reviewed by Ashton Liu on 11.25.2008

Review Rating: 7/10

User Rating: 10/10

The original Fable, while a solid game, failed to live up to so many promises and expectations that it single-handedly made Peter Monyleux's name all but synonymous with the word 'disappointment.' Such is the magnitude of its disappointment that people paid Molyneux almost no attention and even ridiculed him whenever he made announcements for his next game, something that has gotten worse and worse since Black and White was first released. Fortunately, Molyneux promised less and delivered more for the game's sequel, Fable 2, and though it didn't receive quite as much fanfare as the original did when it was released, it is definitely a better game.

Fable 2 begins with the player character wandering the streets as an orphaned beggar with his sister, Rose, performing tasks in order to gain money to buy a magical trinket from a wandering salesman. These small quests are used to familiarize players with the game's quest system and control scheme. After buying the magical trinket, the player character and Rose make a wish to live in the castle of the ruler of Albion. The wish comes true, but with a cruel twist; the owner of the castle, King Lucien, shoots both Rose and the player. Rose dies, but the player survives; the game then fast forwards ten years as the hero leaves on his journey of revenge against Lucien, who has built a large structure called the Spire for unknown purposes.

The story is by the books and fairly linear, and never hits any high points throughout the game. There are memorable characters, as well as the player's dog, who stays by his master's side for the whole game, but as a whole, the game's plot leaves no lasting impressions on the player. Just as the story seems to hit its stride, it inexplicably ends in the most anti-climatic confrontation yet seen in a game. It's almost as if the game only tells half of the story, leaving the rest to be told through DLC or some such. In any case, the draw is the illusion of choice that the game gives to the player as he or she explores the country of Albion. Undertaking certain quests and doing certain actions cause the player to change his alignment between the forces of good and evil and the corruption or purity of his or her personality. Good and evil are self-explanatory - commit crimes and the hero becomes an evil villain that strikes fear in the hearts of all, but do good deeds and women will swoon and children will ask for autographs. Corruption and purity are more concerned with the hero character's tendency to do things that are in favor of himself or others. A selfless hero is pure of heart, whereas a character that indulges in wine, exquisite food, and wanton sex will be corrupt. The system works well, but it suffers from a similar drawback that the first game had - when a character that is fully evil or fully good commits multiple acts of the opposite alignment, people seem to forget his or her prior actions and only react to the most recent ones. My evil overlord went from being feared and hated to being a shining armored knight in the eyes of many, simply because I donated a large sum of money to a beggar.

The impressions that other characters and townspeople have of the player is also dictated by expressions - acts that can either disgust or attract townspeople depending on what they are. While a character can randomly flip people the bird and kill guards with reckless abandon, this makes dating prospects in the game rarer than if the character had blown kisses and given gifts to admirers - which isn't a total loss, anyway, since the characters in the games are complete uggos - but more on that later.

Of course the game would be nothing without combat, and Fable 2's combat is incredibly enjoyable. Players have three distinct battle types to utilize in the game: melee combat, ranged combat, and magic. As each type is utilized, experience is gained in the respective fields to use to expand the player's repertoire of battle maneuvers. Increased melee ability increases strength of each blow, as well as granting special melee abilities. Increasing ranged levels allows the player to target enemies in a third person perspective and aim at individual body parts. Finally, magic spell effects become longer or more damaging as they progress. While most will rely on a mix of all three in order to keep the game fresh, the magic system breaks the game entirely. Incredible feats that can be done by magic, such as slowing down time, confusing enemies, and summoning undead monsters to fight as a personal army are but a few tricks that the player can learn. By the end, any enemy can be defeated rather easily with a combination of Time Control followed by Inferno, then using melee or ranged attacks to take care of the stragglers. This is exacerbated by the fact that there is no limit on magic casting in this game, so players can feel free to use magic with reckless abandon.

There are very few boss fights, and what little there are involve the exact same kind of attack patterns; once you've killed one boss, you've learned the necessary routine to defeat them all. Most large scale confrontations come in the form of the player character fighting against a large army of the enemy's forces, but considering they aren't all that powerful to begin with, these encounters lack any real challenge, and does the player an additional insult of slowing the frame rate down to a crawl. As a result, players will rarely ever die, and even if they do, the penalty (losing a few experience) is so light that it wouldn't matter anyway.

The graphics are top notch, and while they do not shatter expectations, they are incredibly well done. The player will explore many different areas and locales, from large plains lands to dingy pirate cities to marshlands flooded with evil creatures. Though the environments are varied, the enemies, sadly, are not. There are about a dozen different enemy models in the game and any differently named enemies are just palette swaps of the same model, which would be disappointing if they stayed on screen for more than a few seconds during battle. The game's aesthetics, however, are horrible. The selection of clothes for the hero is limited, and what is there simply isn't pleasing to the eye, and the townspeople are all hideous, which made my hero's attempt to search for a wife dead on arrival.

The voice work is similarly well done, and it must have taken an enormous amount of effort in order to fit this much voice work into the game. Characters have a wide variety of voice work to respond to your reputation (or lack thereof), as well as addressing you by your title (which can be changed whenever you wish by the Town Crier present in every town). The music, however, is entirely forgettable, and the less said about it, the better.

The game has a huge amount of extra content; players who want to rush through the main story can do so in 10 to 15 hours, but those adamant about exploring the whole of Albion and finding everything there is in the game can spend upwards of 70 hours on the game.

Unfortunately, the game suffers from some of the worst glitches and bugs I've ever seen. Twice I had to restart my game due to game stopping bugs, and there was more than one occasion where I was stuck on a ledge or between two walls for some inexplicable reason. Similarly, many other bugs reared their ugly heads while I was playing, such as one that made every quest I undertook a success - before I had the chance to even do the quest. People are still finding new bugs as they play the game and it's almost as if Lionhead Studios didn't bother debugging the game for this overwhelming number of anomalies in the game code to make it through the doors and onto store shelves. Also, while a much smaller issue than the glitches and bugs, some achievements in the game require the player to have purchased Fable 2 Pub Games in order to unlock; forcing players to shell out 800 Microsoft Points to get two items in order to unlock an achievement is just a low blow.

With a half-baked story, lack of challenge, and especially the embarrassing amount of bugs, Fable 2 fails to be the game it could have been without these flaws. Without the glitches and the bugs I would've awarded the game a 9, but because I had to restart the game twice due to two different bugs, I imagine other players have had to do so as well, and thus I knocked off 2 points from its score. While it is true that this game is prime for DLC material, anything extra that I pay for this game is only going to make me think that I paid extra to buy what I probably should have gotten in the first place.

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11.25.2008 - Trailer