Ah the Fable franchise, brainchild of everybody’s favourite hype machine Peter Molyneux. As always Mr Bafta Award winning Molyneux has raised expectations for his game far, far beyond its reach. He’s managed to create a game that’s not so much bad (that would be very hard to do with a AAA title) just very tedious and annoying.

 

The game kicks start 50 odd years after the events of Fable II, the hero’s family line have become the rulers of Albion however the current monarch (your brother) is being very tyrannical; forcing children to work, polluting the land, killing anybody who speaking against him and occasionally smacking small kittens with his long horrible greasy hair. In short he’s very bad and so it’s up to you as the only hero left in Albion to start a revolution. To do this you’ll travel across the land promising things like; end child labour, stop mining the mountains for profit, defend a distant land from attack and definitely no kitten slapping on a Tuesday.

 

It’s no secret (in fact heavily lorded by Molyneux himself) that the game doesn’t end once you become king and the reason why Logan, your brother, was being such an ass was because the kingdom is about to be destroyed and he needed the money to pay for an army. Once you’ve become king its then up to you to decide, what to do with the diminished treasury. Do you stop child labour and lose a valuable workforce and cover the cost for their education? Do you mine the mountains for resources or do you keep word? And should you defend a distant land ravaged by war when your own green and pleasant land is in peril? Also it’s very stressful running the country are you sure we can’t just bend the kitten rul—no! Got to be strong!

 

 

I must admit that at first glance this sounds very good and in theory it would have been, but in practice, I’m afraid the game falls a little flat. Throughout the game you make promises and as you promise a little piece of paper comes up with your gamer-tag and picture above it, ramming home that you’re the one promising (even though you don’t have the opportunity to tweak the contract which I would have done) then that promise is put on the wall so you’ll be reminded about it throughout the game. When you do eventually get to the decision that will either make you money or hurt the people this means you should actually feel something about betraying your old friends.

 

But remember when I said “in theory”. The problem is that money is so easy to come by in this game and the grand sum you have to pay for the army is only 6.5 million, which is so easy to get you’ll start to wonder why the hell you needed to pump raw sewage into a village just to save costs in the first place. By the time I reached this point in the game I had over 7million and I kept on collecting thinking I had missed off a zero but no. I managed to be a saintly god and pay for the entire defence of the realm with the money from rental alone. It’s not like I was saving the money either, I bought everything I could and unlike in Fable II there wasn’t anything that was insanely expensive; so you’ll just end up with piles of money left. I’m not a special case either, not some obsessive hoarder of gold (don’t breathe fire or anything), I did a little bit of digging and it’s a common thing.

 

Gameplay wise it is Fable II, not like Fable II, it is Fable II just with some alterations to make everything slower and harder to do. Combat sees us once again mix between Sword/Hammer on the X button, Pistol/Rifle on the Y button and various magical attacks on the B button. It’s just as fluid as it was before as you effortlessly switch between shooting at enemies as they charge towards you and then pull out your sword to run them through when they get close. Maybe a magical area attack when there is more than one. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it and thankfully they didn’t break this part of the game just everything around it. How did they do this? By removing menus.

 

 

Now I do commend Lionhead for attempting to cut down on menus, RPG’s do suffer a lot; where you have a main menu sectioned up into armour, weapons, items, magic; then each section has more sections and inside the section is a detailed list of various stats and a little history lesson about how this rock was once housed inside a monk’s cape before he was attacked by a seagull. What does the rock do? Nobody knows it’s just there, don’t question it, now use that potion before you die. Okay great but the reason why we’ve had menus for so long and why they’ve become so bloated is because they work. People like to know how many potions they have before they go into battle, people like to compare and contrast weapons’ stats and abilities then flip between them on the fly, and you know, some people do actually like to collect every piece of rock in the game and read its description.