Fable 2 is ok...
For anyone perhaps thinking about buying Fable 2 and taking a look at this review, I would urge you to pay closer attention to my review than the score I assigned the game. Please read this less in the context of a review than as a list of things I personally liked or disliked about Fable 2, and why. I accept that this is purely my opinion, and that others may very well love the things I hated.
I played Fable 2 for about 20 hours and then gave up, feeling no urge whatsoever to once more enter Albion. I think that part of the reason for this is that I played through the first Fable twice, and Fable 2 just looks and feels so similar in terms of general design and gameplay that I felt more like I was dipping into Fable again after a long break. The scenery was nice, the stylized characters were cool. Did I love the first Fable? Well, I really liked it. But despite the enhanced freedom, size and physics of Fable 2, my brain seemed to keep telling me I was just playing Fable again, and I was really quite bored most of the time I was playing. I didn't get particularly swept up in the story. I found the major moral decisions of the game interesting, but not enough to make me want to keep playing.
The gameplay, while visually fantastic, suffered from an emphasis on pounding buttons. A lot of the combat was actually pretty strenuous on my thumbs and tendons. While some people may like this, I hated it. I felt as though my RPG experience was being determined by how dexterously I could tap buttons, which is something I really resent. This was only worsened by the ineffective feeling of guns. Even when I sank as much experience as possible into the relevant categories, the guns still felt a bit impotent. I loved the sound effects, and the animations were pretty cool as well.
The dog was a pretty innovative feature, and as someone who has never owned a dog, it was a cool experience to run around with one learning his behavior.
Character personalization I felt was mostly good. I did feel a bit of conflict over how I wanted by character to be, and how I wanted my character to look. For example, I couldn't pump strength stats without making my character look progressively more bull-like, which I didn't want. I wanted to unlock new spells, but I also didn't want my character to have glowing crap over her skin. Little things like that bothered me.
But overall I feel that Fable 2 is a very well designed game, if a little too similar to Fable. If you aren't bothered by the button-mashing combat of the overly familiar feel of the characters and towns, then you might easily become addicted to this game.
