Fable

"Not bad, but short and gimpy"

Fable looks incredible. You'll hear reviews about how great the gameplay is, how deep the customizations are, how much fun it is to tweak the gameplay environment. But, on the exact same page, you'll be hearing from the people who got around to noticing that there's a lot of problems -- not counting the way the game totally disappointed many people who were looking forward to it.

This game is tiny. Everything about it feels like you're on a small path running to get to another small path to do something unimportant after a while. You can do a lot of stuff, sure, but it's all just filler. Getting married? Sure. But all you can do is give gifts to your wife or have sex with her with a lovely black screen covering it up. Buying a house? Alright. But you don't get to decide *which* house, how it looks, or anything about it besides which trophy you stick in there. Once you get over the initial "AWESOME" effect, all of those things just feel like a waste of your time.

This is an RPG, I'm told, but I also note that your dialog options always consist of a very obvious choice if you're even presented a dialog option. Your character never talks, never develops any backstory beyond "Village went up in smoke," and at no point is there ever a really fleshed out story on anyone in the game. Your choice of action always ends up being "Do good" or "Do bad," which one would assume would have some deep meaning to the way people interact with you; it doesn't. If you're very good, they throw themselves at your feet and men and women all feel true love for you. If you're very bad, they run away from you, screaming in fear of your terrible wrath. While that sounds good and all, it's really nothing permanent at all. If you suddenly feel that being bad isn't your thing, you can go donate money to the good god or go around whacking bad people to raise up to being good, or vice versa. What's worse is that the equipment you put on, even the tattoos you get, can all have a huge impact on who you are. You could be the greatest of the good, get a few especially negative-aligned tattoos and a suit of Dark armor, and you'd be the most evil man on the planet within two minutes time. That's shameful to see from a game whose TV ad says something along the lines of "What would you do if every action had consequences that you had to live with?" and whose main selling point is roleplaying.

Which brings me to another big problem I have with this game: nothing you do has any lasting effect on the game besides the quests which all have a linear outcome. If you slaughter an entire village, everyone will reappear in time. If you commit crimes most heinous, the guards will eventually catch you and make you pay gold or forget about it. The only thing that feels like it's a limited resource in the game is the weapons modifiers, and those seem mostly pointless when you consider the battle system in the game.

Your basic hero set up is that you've got a sword, a bow, and "will," which we'll call "magic" for the sake of consistency. You kill things with one of those three tools of destruction and you gain experience in four categories: General XP, Strength XP, Skill XP, Will XP. General XP can be used in any of the three categories, but each of the other three are bound to a specific set and can only be used in that set. As you level up, your character progresses in age (which means nothing besides looking older) and his appearance changes depending on how you spend those points you gain from wanton killing of the enemies you'll face. If you're a magic-loving wizard wannabe, you're liable to end up looking like the stereotypical book-bound mage as you expend your Will XP in the magical arts. If you tend more towards running in and turning your foes into sish kabob, your character will grow to look quite beefy when you up his toughness, health, and strength with that experience.

However, at any time, no matter the development you put in to any of those three abilities, you should be able to do any quest in the game with any of said abilities. On the second day of owning this game, I played the entire thing without using any healing items, being killed, or levelling up in any way from start to finish. The game is ridiculously easy if you make judicious use of blocking and the invincible "dodge roll." The game is still quite easy if you happen to forget what button block is and just spend your money on healing potions to bull your way through the fights. At no point is there an excuse for losing due to dying except that you failed to dodge, block, or eat something mid-fight.

The greatest disappointment of them all; the length. I've played many-a-game that was quite short in my life, but never have I come across a Xbox RPG that was this short. I mentioned playing through the game a second time without levelling on the second day for a very important reason: I had already done everything else by the second day. I read about how the main story, if rushed, should be 30 hours. I then played the game and beat it in 8 hours wherein I had married 2 women and one man just because you can, slaughtered entire towns out of boredom with the main quests, learned all the skills possible, and turned myself from a valiant crusader to an underhanded scumbag and back again.

I'd like to address a large problem you'll be hearing from those who gave this game a 10/10 score on the first day. They'll tell you that the game's not short; you're just rushing through it. That's just not true at all. The game is short, and if you actually enjoy playing the storyline of the game instead of wandering around kicking chickens, I can guarantee that you'll be through this within the space of five days as a casual player. I feel that it's very important that before you even consider picking this up at your local Blockbuster equivalent, you completely and totally understand that point.

If you just can't resist the allure of Fable, don't buy this game. Just go rent it. It's not one of those games that can be more fun to play because of how crappy it is; it's one of those games that makes the little kid inside of you die a little more because of how much better the game could've been if ANY of the glaring problems had been fixed. If you do play this game before you go off and you take a quick scan of the message board, you'll find it to be entertaining for the time it lasts and then grow tired of it. However, the second you finish this game and then remember that Lionhead Studios cut quite a bit of content about a week before ship-date, you'll want to stab something and come write a 1/10 review for this game.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/27/04, Updated 10/01/04