Fable 2 is pretty damn fun.
Pros
Cons
The original Fable garnered a good amount of critical acclaimed but incurred the wrath of many for not featuring some things Peter Molyneux had promised early on, like being able to plant a seed in game and return some time later to find it all grown into a big tree.
Regardless of the promises, the end result was still an utterly fantastic game in my mind and the only ill thing I have to say about it is that it's perhaps a bit too short.
That problem isn't fixed in this sequel.
If for some reason you ignored all the little side quests and neat activities you could probably finish this in under ten hours.
But the game is such a vast improvement on the first with so much more to do, more replayability that it's pretty easy to overlook.
The game starts out with you and your sister, orphans living on the street, needing to gather gold in order to buy a supposedly magic music box that can make there wishes come true. And what they'd like more then anything is to be able to live in the castle.
Of course they need to dig up the funds first and to do this they have to do tasks for some of the townsfolk. The childhood part of the game serves as a tutorial, but even some of the choices you make this early on will have ramifications in later years and the tutorials themselves do a good job of letting you come to grips with the controls.
I won't spoil too much in the off chance you don't already know what happens.
We'll say tragedy strikes and some time later you grow up and Theresa, a character from the first game guides you along your path to revenge.
You can't get revenge without shedding a little blood and the combat is pretty damn good.
Great to watch, even.
You have one button assigned to magic, one to melee attacks and one for your ranged weapons and it makes it pretty easy to switch things up on the fly. Slash an enemy a couple of times with your sword, push them away with force push and finish them off with a head shot with your crossbow.
Money also helps move things along, getting you weapon upgrades and buying houses which sleeping in can grant bonuses, but it isn't necessary and if you're looking to be a more pure hero you could probably do without money.
To get money you have to do jobs, because unlike in the first game the hero stuff doesn't really pay for itself. Jobs such as blacksmithing, bar tending, or wood chopping are a little bit tedious. You press your button as the little mark passes over the highlighted area and as you continue it speeds up, but you get more money.
There are also more exciting jobs. Like Bounty Hunting, in which a guard assigns you to rid the place of some evil. Could be beetles. Could be bandits. Could be trolls. You get paid according to how difficult the task is.
Same goes for assassinations and slave trading.
Unfortunately with these tasks the pay is often not as good as it would be if you took the time you used doing these activities and instead used it on blacksmithing or what have you, so if you want money badly for some reason you'll be bartending when you'd rather be a badass bountyhunter or assassin simply because it seems to pay better.
You can also get money buy stuffing around with the economy.
Buy low, sell high! You can also play Evil Land Lord and purchase pretty much every building you see and if you don't mind people thinking less of you, you can totally jack up the rent and rake in a vast fortune which'll hit your wallet every five minutes, even when you're not playing your wallet will continue to burst from the seams!
Theres good and evil as there was in the first game, which is generally pretty self explanatory.
Theres also a pure and corrupt scale which I think generally ties into money and certain actions like eating meat - cause an animal was harmed in making it, it'd corrupt you somewhat. Having sex with hookers can corrupt. Not that I'd know!
The moral choices are more meaningful in this game then the previous Fable.
I'm a big old softy, so I can't speak for the general public but in me at least the game succeeded in eliciting the emotional responses Mr. Molyneux had been going on about in all the interviews and whatnot. There were a couple of tear jerking moments. Some tough decisions to make that really made me think and some I wound up regretting after i had made them.
A job well done in that regard.
The dog. You get em pretty early on and he's pretty reliable.
If theres treasure nearby he'll pick up on it, something to dig he'll pick up on it. If a foe is downed the dog will try to maul him and the dogs capabilities can be improved via upgrades received from training manuals which I guess leads us to talking about character interaction.
There isn't a great deal. People will talk to you, sure.
But in response all you can really do is fart at them. Or dance for them. Give them a thumbs up.
It wasn't all that great in the first Fable and it isn't a whole lot better here.
Some expressions are more interactive then others in that they can be "extended" and give better results if you pull it off, but if you fail then you could be ridiculed. Especially if you mess up the fart expression.
I'm not asking for some Mass Effectesque dialogue trees, but the system needs improving.
If you're going to make us use expressions the least you could do is add a "talk" expression so our character can at least spout one liners or little pieces of dialogue so we can communicate in more then farts and hand gestures.
Co-op I was looking forward too a great deal but Co-op actually makes the game worse in this instance. Co-op should only make things better, so to see it be so bad is kind of disappointing.
For starters you cannot use your hero if you're joining another game.
Sure he might have your stats and the experience you gain in another persons game transfers back into yours, but he lacks your appearance and instead you can choose from a few frankly rather ugly preset options.
And the camera is pretty shoddy.
It zooms too far back in my eyes to allow you both on the screen, but it makes the action seem totally smaller and it also has a habit of moving into dumb angles and making the action hard to see even disregarding the level of zoom put in.
Honestly, Co-op isn't really worth your time.
I'll wrap things up. Fable 2 is a fantastic game and a great improvement over the original, so if you liked that one you should pick it up. If you didn't like that one, well I'm not entirely sure this would change your mind but I'd say it was worth a rental regardless.
- Simple, though still quite involving combat that's as fun to play as it is visually impressive.
- Moral choices that make differences beyond having folk either love you or hate you.
- Terrific audio and visuals that do a good job of immersing you in this Fairy Tale.
- Lots of neat little side activities to do.
- A good amount of humor, both dark and more lighthearted.
- A good amount of interesting Albion history in it's books and many references to the first game which fans will appreciate.
Cons
- Co-op is pretty crap.
- A few graphical glitches.
- It's as short as the first Fable.
- Cumbersome menu navigation.
- Interaction with other people still pretty much consists solely of farting at them.
The original Fable garnered a good amount of critical acclaimed but incurred the wrath of many for not featuring some things Peter Molyneux had promised early on, like being able to plant a seed in game and return some time later to find it all grown into a big tree.
Regardless of the promises, the end result was still an utterly fantastic game in my mind and the only ill thing I have to say about it is that it's perhaps a bit too short.
That problem isn't fixed in this sequel.
If for some reason you ignored all the little side quests and neat activities you could probably finish this in under ten hours.
But the game is such a vast improvement on the first with so much more to do, more replayability that it's pretty easy to overlook.
The game starts out with you and your sister, orphans living on the street, needing to gather gold in order to buy a supposedly magic music box that can make there wishes come true. And what they'd like more then anything is to be able to live in the castle.
Of course they need to dig up the funds first and to do this they have to do tasks for some of the townsfolk. The childhood part of the game serves as a tutorial, but even some of the choices you make this early on will have ramifications in later years and the tutorials themselves do a good job of letting you come to grips with the controls.
I won't spoil too much in the off chance you don't already know what happens.
We'll say tragedy strikes and some time later you grow up and Theresa, a character from the first game guides you along your path to revenge.
You can't get revenge without shedding a little blood and the combat is pretty damn good.
Great to watch, even.
You have one button assigned to magic, one to melee attacks and one for your ranged weapons and it makes it pretty easy to switch things up on the fly. Slash an enemy a couple of times with your sword, push them away with force push and finish them off with a head shot with your crossbow.
Money also helps move things along, getting you weapon upgrades and buying houses which sleeping in can grant bonuses, but it isn't necessary and if you're looking to be a more pure hero you could probably do without money.
To get money you have to do jobs, because unlike in the first game the hero stuff doesn't really pay for itself. Jobs such as blacksmithing, bar tending, or wood chopping are a little bit tedious. You press your button as the little mark passes over the highlighted area and as you continue it speeds up, but you get more money.
There are also more exciting jobs. Like Bounty Hunting, in which a guard assigns you to rid the place of some evil. Could be beetles. Could be bandits. Could be trolls. You get paid according to how difficult the task is.
Same goes for assassinations and slave trading.
Unfortunately with these tasks the pay is often not as good as it would be if you took the time you used doing these activities and instead used it on blacksmithing or what have you, so if you want money badly for some reason you'll be bartending when you'd rather be a badass bountyhunter or assassin simply because it seems to pay better.
You can also get money buy stuffing around with the economy.
Buy low, sell high! You can also play Evil Land Lord and purchase pretty much every building you see and if you don't mind people thinking less of you, you can totally jack up the rent and rake in a vast fortune which'll hit your wallet every five minutes, even when you're not playing your wallet will continue to burst from the seams!
Theres good and evil as there was in the first game, which is generally pretty self explanatory.
Theres also a pure and corrupt scale which I think generally ties into money and certain actions like eating meat - cause an animal was harmed in making it, it'd corrupt you somewhat. Having sex with hookers can corrupt. Not that I'd know!
The moral choices are more meaningful in this game then the previous Fable.
I'm a big old softy, so I can't speak for the general public but in me at least the game succeeded in eliciting the emotional responses Mr. Molyneux had been going on about in all the interviews and whatnot. There were a couple of tear jerking moments. Some tough decisions to make that really made me think and some I wound up regretting after i had made them.
A job well done in that regard.
The dog. You get em pretty early on and he's pretty reliable.
If theres treasure nearby he'll pick up on it, something to dig he'll pick up on it. If a foe is downed the dog will try to maul him and the dogs capabilities can be improved via upgrades received from training manuals which I guess leads us to talking about character interaction.
There isn't a great deal. People will talk to you, sure.
But in response all you can really do is fart at them. Or dance for them. Give them a thumbs up.
It wasn't all that great in the first Fable and it isn't a whole lot better here.
Some expressions are more interactive then others in that they can be "extended" and give better results if you pull it off, but if you fail then you could be ridiculed. Especially if you mess up the fart expression.
I'm not asking for some Mass Effectesque dialogue trees, but the system needs improving.
If you're going to make us use expressions the least you could do is add a "talk" expression so our character can at least spout one liners or little pieces of dialogue so we can communicate in more then farts and hand gestures.
Co-op I was looking forward too a great deal but Co-op actually makes the game worse in this instance. Co-op should only make things better, so to see it be so bad is kind of disappointing.
For starters you cannot use your hero if you're joining another game.
Sure he might have your stats and the experience you gain in another persons game transfers back into yours, but he lacks your appearance and instead you can choose from a few frankly rather ugly preset options.
And the camera is pretty shoddy.
It zooms too far back in my eyes to allow you both on the screen, but it makes the action seem totally smaller and it also has a habit of moving into dumb angles and making the action hard to see even disregarding the level of zoom put in.
Honestly, Co-op isn't really worth your time.
I'll wrap things up. Fable 2 is a fantastic game and a great improvement over the original, so if you liked that one you should pick it up. If you didn't like that one, well I'm not entirely sure this would change your mind but I'd say it was worth a rental regardless.
