Fable II

"An excellent game letdown by some niggling flaws"

Fable 2 is the latest project from Lionhead studios, which is the stomping ground of much celebrated games designer Peter Molyneux. Molyneux is famous, or perhaps the word should be infamous, for talking up his games, promising the world and building the gaming community up into a frenzied, salivating, delirious hype monster and then releasing a serviceable game that fulfills barely any of his original promises. You will be all too aware of this if you played the original Fable game on Xbox, it was heralded to be the game that redefined how action RPGs are played, it was going to have a fully integrated family system where you can have numerous children, plants in game that actually grow and any number of overblown ideas. So when the game came out, it was actually very good, but this was lost on quite a few reviewers when they looked back at the promises made by Molyneux.

It makes me pause to wonder just how many of the games development team were seen slapping their foreheads in frustration and groaning, "Peter! Shut up you fool! We can't do that yet!" As they watched him hang himself at the Game Developers Convention or wherever, So it stands to reason that you would expect Lionhead to gag Molyneux in the build up to the release of Fable 2. Were they successful? Well, yes and no. Indeed, there is nothing absent from the game that was specifically said would be there, but there are many features that are seriously lacking.

The first and most notable addition to the game, is your companion, the dog. Supposedly this is to implement love and emotion into the game, something Molyneux had been harping on about for some time whilst being blissfully unaware that feeling love for a computer generated animal is NOT going to happen. In the build up to the game, I was expecting the dog to be absolutely revolutionary, it was going redefine how all video game dogs were perceived and completely change the way I thought about... Dogs. In actual fact, pretty much all the dog does is act as a treasure hunter, that's it. It barks at you when it finds treasure and you have to follow it for ages as it sometimes seems to get lost and wander around aimlessly until eventually you can unearth some pointless item that you needn't have bothered with. I am not saying the dog is a bad thing, it is just distincty unremarkable. It is nothing we haven't seen before really and the main strong point of this furry feature is that it isn't annoying, it doesn't get in the way (much) and you never find yourself screaming "GET OUT OF THE WAY YOU USELESS CRETIN!" At the screen, which is a blessing.

You won't be greatly disappointed by the dog, just kind of, indifferent really, which is not the effect Peter Molyneux was striving to achieve. At least they didn't say that the dog would have wings and could turn into a mighty dragon and disintegrate your enemies at the touch of a button. Admittedly, that would have been more useful than "Oh! You dug up 25 Gold! Good dog! I already have 6 million, but never mind, at least you're trying."

Fable 2 is very true to the original, you begin as a small child in the slums of Bowerstone Old Town and essentially tragedy befalls you when you and a sister are shot by a mad man named Lucien because you're going to get in the way of his nefarious and evil scheme in some way or another, but typically, you're hero survives and is taken in by a mysterious gypsy by Theresa were you train yourself to be a Hero and brood on thoughts of revenge. Eventually the day comes for you to set out on your path of heroism or evil and after this the game takes on the standard Quest format. There are a series of storyline quests that you must complete to unlock new areas and a plethora of sidequests.

One of the strong points of Fable 1, the morality system, makes a welcome and slightly updated return in Fable 2. There are many quests and choices you make that dictate your alignment. Many of these seem relatively innocuous, but that actually will have a very big effect on the game world. For example, will you give the arrest warrants at the start of the game to the sheriff or to the criminal? This will dictate whether Old Town is a lawless, crime haven or an upstanding, desirable place to live. This idea of "every choice has a consequence" is excellent and it genuinely makes you think about your choices sometimes, you wonder what effect it will have later in the game. Some are very obvious though, such as whether or not you invest in a quest called "Westcliff Development." But you will often find yourself thinking about which choice is right for the alignment of your character.

One criticism I will make of morality system is that being Good makes the world a far nicer, better developed place with more colour and prosperity. This is fair enough to an extent, but it does mean that there is little reward for being evil in the game besides the ability to murder villagers and innocent bystanders with impunity. When I finished the game being a completely evil git, I was kind of disappointed with how rundown and bleak the world seemed, also everyone hated me which didn't help. But despite this, a great deal can be said for running down a street summoning magical swords to fly through the air and skewer farmers as they desperately flee.

Being either Good or Evil will morph your appearance, good characters developing lovely blonde hair and fair skin, and evil characters getting red eyes and grey skin. However, unlike the original, there is now the option to be Pure or Corrupt. Being Pure means you always use protection when having sex, you lower the prices of rent and you do lots of nice things such as play the Lute for people. As a result, you get a pure complexion and a little halo above your head that looks completely stupid. Being corrupt means you can raise the price of rent extremely high, have threesomes without protection and pretty much do what you want. However, you will have to suffer the consequences of a poor complexion, and if you're evil, stupid horns growing from your head. The addition of purity/corruption means that you can be evil without stupid horns and you can be good and have bags under your eyes and look like you've been drinking all night and then gambling the day away. Which you have.

One thing I despise about the purity/corruption element is the way food and drink alter it. For example, eating fruit and vegetables raises purity, fair enough. But why does eating meat and fish etc. Lower purity so much? I heard the head game developers are vegans and they put this in as a moral message. If so, please do not patronise me and impose your own beliefs on me in a game. The idea that eating meat gained from hunting or possibly humane farming methods is corrupt really annoys me. It makes the developers look like self righteous dicks.

Also, since when did drinking three pints of beer make you instantly fat? Well, getting fat in Fable 2 is laughably easy and this can be very annoying since at times you are forced to heal yourself using food. In Fable 1, if you had low health you didn't get fat eating meat, however, if your health bar was full you would put on weight since you didn't need the meat. This was a good system that didn't punish you for having to heal yourself when you're out of potions. Losing the fat is also really difficult, your Hero can run around for miles, sometimes travelling 120 miles ON FOOT and simply not shedding any pounds. The only way to lose weight seems to be to eat Celery, and it can take hours of purchasing celery from different produce stalls to make yourself thin again.

In addition to morality system adjusting your appearance, the abilities you choose to develop will have an affect on your appearance. Developing strength and physique will give you a ridiculous Hulk of a hero that looks like you have wide screen set up incorrectly, developing skill will make your hero tall and slender, like an elf and levelling Will (magic) causes glowing Will lines to appear all over your body. This system is effective as it means that no two playthroughs will be the same, all my characters have looked drastically different, I have a hulking warlord of a character, a swift and stealthy Gunslinger and a diminutive Mage that hides absurd levels of power. The ability to make different characters and have custom classes, or just max every stat, in addition to your morality, makes the slogan "Who will you become?" rather apt.

Aside from your actions altering your appearance, much like the first game, you are free to purchase clothes and haircuts and beards. There are a reasonably good number to choose from and you can even sport a beard if your a female character, to my delight. It is very easy to create a completely unique character with the addition of dyes. You can purchase dyes and then use them on any item of clothing and hair for a massive amount of combinations, I have never seen two heroes on any of my friend's games that look the same as mine. The addition of dyes lets you "stamp your personality" on your hero, for want of a better phrase. However, all these dyes seemingly made Lionhead forget to include a vast array of clothing. There is quite a lot, but to be honest, most looks stupid and I found myself always wearing the Noble Gent's outfit or Highwaymen, though later you can combine elements of different outfits for a unique appearance and you have a bit more leeway if you're evil and don't mind being an ugly bugger. However, they definitely should have included more clothing in the game.

Another feature new to Fable 2 is one-button combat. While that sounds incredibly dull and crap on paper, they manage to pull it off fairly well and make combat enjoyable. This isn't just a case of mashing the attack button like Star Fox Adventures or something (though it can be) you can pull of Flourishes and chain attacks and some other cool comboes. When the combat looks cool, it is easy to forgive its flaws and how easy it is. When you see your Hero parry a bandit attack, turn him around and ram his sword through his chest before kicking said bandit off his sword and over the edge of a cliff then throwing the sword in the air, spinning round, grabbing it and decapitating three more bandits with one swipe, it is hard not to go, "Wow, thats pretty cool actually."

The combat is also context specific, apparently. This basically means that if you are fighting from the high ground, on some stairs for example, you have an advantage and if you are near a cliff edge you will try and barge enemies off the edge etc. The game often gets confused with what context you're in though and you find yourself kicking a bandit chief in the shins when you intended to carve him a new one. This minor fault aside, the combat is actually very good and satisfying.

In additon to melee combat, you have ranged combat and magic at your disposal. Ranged combat involves standing back and blasting the enemy until they die, but eventually via levelling up, you can acquire the ability to aim at specific body parts and skillfully disarm opponents with a well placed shot and decapitate them, not to mention the ultimate ownage of Groin shots. This makes playing as a ranged character very difficult for the first half of the game and very easy the second half once you have a few more abilities.

Magic in the game has its annoyances, the first one being how sluggish and slow it is to hold the R trigger and cycle through which spell you want to use and what spell charges at which level. When doing this you cannot move, so you have to pause the game in combat and change your spells in the menu. This breaks up the flow of the game tremendously and is really, really annoying and clunky and Lionhead should have thought it through a lot more. Secondly, magic is broken and much of the game is a case of "Charge Inferno to level 5 and unleash" to complete the game. Sure, you can be attacked whilst charging but the level of destruction unleashed more than compensates for a few Millimetres off your health bar.

Having said that, Fable 2 is a very easy game anyway. Made all the easier by a completely stupid and ridiculous idea. That idea is that you do not die and you do not revert to a previous save when knocked down by your foes in traditional video game fashion. You merely lose the experience orbs you haven't collected and get a scar on your character that is permanent, that's it, you can just get up and carry on fighting. What Peter Molyneux needs to realise is that not everyone really cares about getting a scar on a video game character, and these people can really see how stupid this system is. You are never uncomfortable in a battle because you cannot die, whoever had this idea needs to have their balls scolded with an iron. I don't mind a game being fairly easy, but at least punish me for when I do screw up, please.

Though it may sound like I am completely crucifying the game for the absence of a death system, if it did have a normal way of dying, you would still never see it. This is because you will be so inundated with Resurrection Phials and will have about thirty litres of Health Potions about your person at all times, so there is very little danger of... Not dying in the first place.

Lionhead decided to add to the game and make earning money a large part of the gameplay. At the start of the game, Gold is very hard to acquire, you will not find any from completing quests and must cope with the meagre scrapings that your Dog can dig up. I think this is a very good idea as, at least early in the game, money has much more value. To earn money you must participate in a rather mundane job mini-game, you can work as a blacksmith which involves pressing A when a marker is over a sweet spot to strike the sword, you can be a woodcutter which involves pressing A when a marker is over a sweet spot and bartending, which involves pressing A when a marker is over a sweet spot. The blacksmith job is the first one available and also quite difficult once you progress and build your Gold multiplier, the woodcutting job is pointless and is probably the most boring thing I have ever done in a video game ever, but it is supposed to be a job so I can let Lionhead off for overzealous application of realism I guess...

There is a great inbalance in the jobs however, since anyone with any sense will rush through the story until the bartending job becomes available. This is because it is ludicrously easy and you can earn an absurd amount of gold per pint. If in real life, bartenders earned say, £1000 for every pint they serve then how on earth would any pub make a profit? Also, it would be the single most desirable job on the planet and all anyone's ambition would be to become a bartender, they'd be earning more than professional footballers (soccer players.) Yes, this is rather pedantic of me and I was grateful to be able to make some relatively easy money, but it renders the other jobs completely useless. Yes, you can make over 1000 Gold per sword in blacksmithing, but it is so much harder and requires much more concentration and it basically isn't worth it. There are other jobs available if you're evil, such as assassinating people or "recruiting slaves" but these serve as fun mini quests rather than a means to an end.

Once you have earned a good portion of dough, you are free to spend it on literally ANY property in the game. You can rent out houses, own pubs, blacksmiths and various other shops and building your Real Estate empire is a fun and addictive experience. It is a slow and difficult process at first as property takes a very long time to pay for itself, but you feel a sense of achievement when you turn your Xbox on to find a 300,000 Gold fortune awaiting you. Yes, that's right, you earn income every five minutes real time, even when your Xbox 360 is off, though the earn rate is not the same and has a cap on it when the console is switched off I believe.

The one problem I have with this is that the value of money greatly diminishes once you have built your empire. Once you are a real estate King and own every property in the game, what do you spend your wealth on? Nothing! The best weapons in the game are all obtained for free and all you basically do with your Real Estate empire is watch the vast sea of Gold roll in until you have 5,000,000 Gold and buy weapons just for the sake of using the Gold you worked so hard to acquire. You're not really getting rewarded for it, sure, there are some massive properties such as a castle that you need to save up for, but other than that the only purpose for Gold in this game is so you can start buying properties and amassing a worthless fortune. That does not detract from the originality of the idea (in an RPG) and with some expansion it could really be excellent in future games.

This game does not want to reward you very often and this refusal to give you anything worthwhile is the biggest issue I have with it. Build your Dogs treasure hunting skill up to the maximum and he will dig up 500 Gold instead of 20, but by the time you have levelled him, you are earning 15,000 Gold every five minutes, rendering this ability pointless. Hunt all over the world finding the 50 (supposedly, though there appears to be 51) Silver Keys to unlock a chest in the castle and when you do you will get a measly 50,000 Gold, no legendary weapon, nothing. Completely and utter waste of time barring the achievement.

It sometimes becomes a case of "What's the point?" You carry out some of these tasks that take an absolute age but the reward is so irrelevant and pointless that it makes you wonder why you bothered. For example, the Archaeologist Quest, you are tasked with recovering an ancient artifact by searching the ENTIRE WORLD for scrolls telling you how to open a door. You don't just go and find these scrolls, you have to solve a usually simple riddle to work out the location, and there is only one I had trouble with. Problem is, there are thirteen scrolls to find and when you finally get back and open the secret tomb, expecting a Legendary sword the size of a totem pole that shoots lightning at your foes, you get... a Gem stone. That's it! A Gem stone! What is the purpose of this? It is worth a lot of Gold!

BUT I HAVE ALREADY GOT A MASSIVELY POINTLESS FORTUNE!!! GIVE ME SOMETHING WORTHWHILE!!!

...Is what I screamed in frustration at the TV and is what you will too if you have any sense. I this sounds like I am really crucifying and laying into Fable 2 and to get this point across is why I rewrote the review, if the game wasn't largely incredibly enjoyable and presented with great charm and character, then yeah, I would hate it. But as it stands it is a good game, it should just reward you for playing a little more often.

The theme of "What's the point?" makes a return when it comes to getting married, seriously, what's the ****ing point? Barring one extra quest at the end, there isn't any, whatsoever! In the first game, marrying Lady Grey could net you the Solus Sword as a gift, in this game your wife will shower you with Economy Value Necklaces and hassle you for sex every time you are away for more than thirty seconds. You can have children, but again, what is the point? Unless you like hearing annoyingly high pitch cries of "Please don't leave me Dad!" The fact that you cannot kill children in this game further compounds this annoyance. Also, you will get divorced so many times its unreal. There should be an option to say to your wife "I am going to save the ****ing world, which is more important than giving you gifts and banging you!" To make sure she understands the magnitude of your task and won't leave you.

While I am still in full rant, lets look at the co-op aspect of Fable 2, because there is a badly implemented and crap feature if ever there was one. Anyone can join your game, either on Xbox live (though not uninvited obviously) and they create a basic henchman, the host then sets the distribution rates for Gold and EXP and you adventure together. Except well, I'd rather cut my eyes out to be frank. You don't have a split screen and must share the same screen at all times, which makes for many infuriating camera angles, and unable-to-be-seen enemies that will take a huge chunk from your health before before your halfwit of a co-op companion catches up with you and centres the camera. Yes, you can teleport to the hero's side if you're a henchman, but this seems to spaz the camera out as well. Aiming when shooting is also very hard as it cannot enter first person view for obvious reasons, the whole experience is a clunky mess and I sat patiently waiting for my brother to get bored and kindly leave my game that he joined without invitation.

Also, Peter Molyneux was talking about how not having any armour values means everyone can have unique looking heroes and you can see how everyone else plays, whether they are good or evil, pure or corrupt etc. This is all very well, but you play as a faceless henchman, a pre-formed basic character. This kind of makes his whole argument for not having armour invalid no? There is no real "Hero sharing" you cannot admire each others fashion sense, well you can for the host, but I wanted to play as MY hero in co-op with a friend and show off the wonderful dye combinations I had agonised over. This aspect is really something the game can do without and something I only tried out for the purpose of a review.

From the weakest points of the game to the strongest. This game is so lovingly crafted that you cannot help but fall in love with it, particularly if you loved the original. The humour is fantastic, just read the item descriptions if you want a good laugh, it is one of the funniest games I have played since Monkey Island. The voice acting is utterly superb and I cannot praise it enough, perhaps the best I have seen in any game. I may be biased being British myself, but it is wonderful to hear so many regional accents in the game, west country accents, brummy accents and northern England accents as well as Scottish and Irish. The guards in each city have absolutely fantastic voices.

It is also a very pleasant surprise to hear such well known actors as Stephen Fry, Zoe Wanamaker, Oliver Cotton and Julia Sawalha lending their talent to a video game. Yes, I really did just say "Stephen Fry" he really is in the game! The level of effort and presentation put into the game is very high. The graphics are largely excellent, the environments are lush and incredibly colourful, in contrast to much of the stark, grey and post-apocalyptic environments found in the vast dreary catalogue of First Person Shooters to be found on a console. I am awarding points just for a game that isn't brown and grey, or a game that isn't a basic sci-fi premise that could have been devised by a six year old space marines with big guns vs bigger aliens, yeah I like having a dig at Gears of War.

But, as has been a theme in this review, each good point as a deformed and ugly sibling hiding in its shadow that it doesn't want to talk about. In this case it is glitches and bugs. There are more bugs in this game than Bill Oddie could annoyingly gesticulate over. It really is unacceptable and it is only through my love of the Fable series and willingness to forgive Lionhead that I haven't thrown the disc from my window in a rage. You can expect disappearing wives, inexplicable divorces, unresponsive children and even some nice glitches that break your game such as getting locked inside someone's house. I have had to replay quests at times because an NPC will disappear. Luckily these are often easily rectifiable, but the very fact that you are having to devise schemes to correct glitches in a game is just ridiculous. If you are lucky, you might not encounter any, it seems to depend on your copy as to what glitches you can find and luckily, most of them are not devastating.

Reading back through this review, it really sounds like I dislike much of this game and have done nothing but focus on the negatives. This isn't true, as much as there is wrong with it, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and fully completed the game twice being good and evil each time. I have focused no the negatives because well, the overall experience is very pleasing and satisfying, the adventuring is very fun as is building your empire and there is little point in writing about things that just work seamlessly and raise no issues. Sure there are problems, but they manage not to completely overshadow what is a very good game and can only be improved with a much needed patch and some downloadable content. Hint hint. I am a bit of a Fable fanboy, but I had to really take off my rose tinted spectacles to review this game and only the most ardent of fanboys would ignore the many flaws.

This game looks good and plays good for the most part and if you loved the first one, then, you will love this game for sure. I commend the effort and care Lionhead put into their games, despite the annoying bugs prevalent throughout, and I wish all video game companies could strive to create innovative and original games. I mean come on, Lionhead could have made another FPS where you play as some stupidly muscle bound marine and shoot down hordes of huge aliens like every other Xbox 360 game. Instead they made a very fun and unique game where your choices really do have an impact, your first few playthroughs will definitely not be the same, I assure you. So if you're willing to overlook some niggling flaws, then find out who you will become.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/03/08, Updated 11/18/08

Game Release: Fable II (EU, 10/24/08)