Trouble in the land of Albion
I really wanted to like Fable 3, I really did. As much as I liked Fable 1 and even liked alot of Fable 2, I couldn't bring myself to bring up the same amount of liking towards this game for a couple of reasons.
But I should say that not everything about this game put me off:
First of all I should say the writing and voice-acting along with the music are excellent. The dialogue is funny, the writing is good and it all sounds very authentic. And who doesn't like John Cleese voicing their butler!
Second of all, there were some interesting design decisions: the traditional start menu has been replaced by a sort of hub, where each room is used for either clothing, weaponry, achievements, options, and map. But while it all looks very neat, I always found the traditional menu to be alot more functional then the new one, as it takes longer to get to where I want.
Sadly a game can't stand on neat writing and interesting design alone:
I've ran into multiple cases where I teleported somewhere for a quest and the area didn't even load in, and I was looking at this weird hell of half-loaded textures up to one point where I thought my xbox was dying.
Second gripe I had is that I feel the combat has changed about 0.5% from Fable 2. It's still quite monotonous button mashing mixed in with a couple of magic and gunshot blasts for hitting the further away targets.
Then there's just overall jankiness: there were parts of the game where the breadcrumb trail (The little glowpath that shows the path to your next objective) would simply not work and point me straight into a wall, also the mechanic where you have to impress the villagers makes a return from fable 2, however this time you can only impress one villager at a time, instead of Fable 2 where you could impress a whole group of villagers at once, making this alot more tedious then it should be.
ESPECIALLY if impressing a villager gives you a Guild Seal (read: Upgrade points).
Man's best friend also makes a return and tells you where to find treasure and dig spots like before, but sometimes he takes a REALLY long time to get to where the actual digspot is, which is kind of annoying as well.
Bottom line is that Fable 3 is riddled with awkward decisions, some interesting, some annoying. But if you can manage to look past most of the issues listed above, there's still an interesting game here for you to enjoy, although perhaps not for everyone.
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