So first off yes, this is late. I wanted to finish the game before I gave a final judgment. I argued with myself over how this should be written: review the game based solely on its merits and flaws or compare it to the first game or both. In the end I chose both but really emphasized the comparison aspect.



The visuals are mediocre. For how long the 360 has been out and with all the other developers “wowing” me like Fallout, Oblivion, Bioshock, etc, these graphics are just not up to par. Many people complain of the “ice skating effect,” this is when your character appears to be skating on ice rather than running on the ground. I never noticed this until I heard this complaint from others, then I saw it all the time. The visuals for Fable 1 were great and fit the art direction that game was going with. These just felt lazy. It’s as if they had two separate art directions for characters and environments; with characters taking on a cartoony feel and the environments looking very real.



The sound and music are spectacular. The little music that is in the game fits so well you don’t ever notice that there is music until you pause the game and realize how quiet it is. The sound effects and voice acting are also excellent. Yes there may only be a few NPC voices but all are done well enough to bring you into the game. The dog noises in particular are a real treat, they had my real dog reacting every time the dog in the game found something.



Story, or lack there of. It is just a simple revenge story from the very beginning. I was very caught up in the story of Fable 1, and looked forward to what twists the plot would weave in the second installment… but they never came. This is my biggest complaint as the only reason I kept playing this sub par game was to find out what Monlyneux had in store for me, turns out it was nothing.



Combat-wombat-garbage bat! There is one button for mele attacks, one button for blocking, and one button for combo-like flourishes…..and guess what theyre all the same button! Isn’t that neat? Well no it’s a terrible system designed for retarded “non gamers” who have the motor skills and hand-eye coordination of an aborted fetus. Magic is one button that is held to charge up the spell(during this you cant move, or block and you take damage) to do more damage, instead of holding the button to make the spell last longer and link to more enemies to do more damage as in Fable1. Guns and crossbows are very fun to use in this game, guns in particular. Although you cant run and shoot at the same time…wtf? The manual aiming system is awful and the auto aim feature frequently does not pick the enemy closest to you. Even with these problems it was very satisfying to shoot someone and see them fly back with experience orbs flowing like blood.

There are other problems with bad design that just exacerbate the poor gaming experience. The menu/item select screen and the expression wheel. To eat food you have to pause the game, scroll to items, then scroll to food, then scroll the piece of food to eat, eat it, then it throws you back into the game. If you want to eat another piece of food or the same type of food you have to do this all over again. In Fable 1 food and potions could be hot keyed to the d pad manually. They have removed this feature and instead the game will hot key items it thinks you need. To be fair it will hot key potions, but only when you are about to die with a sliver of health left, in the heat of an awkward one button battle you have decide to pause it or hope the game hot keys the potion in time. In a game that touts it’s ability to choose your own path, the expression wheel is the ultimate personification of this….except instead of re tooling the difficult to use wheel from the last game they decided to use a similarly hard to use and extremely awkward piece of garbage. With the rest of the game so “nerfed” in terms of user control(one button combat and no hot key) and other games streamlining path control(mass effect, KoTOR) the expression wheel is just too daunting to use.



Bugs, oh man there are so many bugs! From visual errors to sound bugs to game play mishaps. There is a lot of clipping in this game, and it was very distracting when I am trying to immurse myself in this other world when my head passes through a rock or my knees go through chairs. I metioned the ice capades earlier. The sound will cut in and out, with loud scratches when it pops back in. I don’t know how many times I came back from a mission or quest and the person I had to see to collect the reward was invisible. The bredcrum trail that lead to them and encircled them was there but the NPC was invisible. Fable 1 had all of these problems but I expected to see less or none at all in the sequel.

It sounds as if I hated the game, and in truth I did. I had very high hopes because I loved the first game so much. I think they changed way too much and none of what they changed was for the better. Hopefully I can get an extra %20 at game crazy trading this in and pre ordering left 4 dead.