When I bought my copy of Fable 2 on Oct. 21, I was excited; really excited.

Why, because I fell for that sneaky British Tom named Peter Molyneux. Ever since Fable 2 was announced he’s been hyping the game up as the full and finished vision of what Fable was supposed to be: A riveting story with complex moral choices in a vibrant world filled with endless amounts of exploration.

Molyneux has made a good game; not a great one.

First off, the combat system is better. The problem with the original Fable is that the combat was so clunky that you had trouble handling the enemies they gave you, because you couldn’t get the controls to have split time reaction. This lead you into getting the shit kicked out of you every way till Sunday. Fable 2’s system is much more fluid and incorporates all three schools of attacks into your fighting style so you no longer have to focus on just one; that one was either melee or ranged because lets face it, magic in the first game was useless. The thing is the combat system is so easy to use that slaughtering the idiots that stand in your way is too easy. I could easily have taken on three times the amount of enemies in the game without breaking a sweat.

The world: bigger, yes. Better, No. the world is much larger in scope but still too narrow. The great outdoors of Albion feel more like a maze with trees with a dog who’s A.I. leads you into fence posts more often than anything useful.

The biggest problems with the game are that it lacks truly memorable moments. Molyneux said in an interview with IGN.com that there are going to be moral choices that will be so compelling that you will need to set the controller down and think about it before you make a decision. There is, at the very end of the game. If you look at a game that did story changing decisions well, like Mass Effect, Fable 2 doesn’t hold a candle to it.

The final deal breaker in Fable 2 was the complete lack of boss fights in the game. No, the Trolls don’t count. Why don’t the trolls count? Because they were in the first one and the first Fable still had a load of boss fight: the kraken, Thunder and ultimately Jack of Blades. Fable 2 kept leading you on like a drunken sorority girl to a boss fight that never came. The one time there was a partial boss fight was with Lord Lucien’s Lieutenant in the spire. Interesting fight, but not a boss fight; why? Because the freakin game says that the guy you are about to castrate and send packing to the river Styx is nothing special and the spire is cranking them out like lead painted toys from China. You later run into these archetype characters in the game whose fights are harder than the actual “boss fight”.

The complete blue balls moment was when the game comes to a climax with Lucien. You come face to face with him in his spire, a monument to his obsessions and tyrannical power. You have spent your entire life seeking revenge for the murder of your sister. He is the catalyst behind your purpose in Albion. Does an epic boss fight ensue? Nope, boss fight cock block; you end the game with analogue sticks left erect.