Oh Peter Molyneux you handsome devil, you should consider a career in politics. You always promise so much and fail to keep those promises, delivering decent, but shallow games. Fable 2 was a fun action-adventure game with VERY light elements of RPG, riddled with half-arsed and ambitious concepts that weren't carried through all the way to completion. In the end, it was a fun diversion, but one that could have benefited from being more refined and well thought out. Fable 3 suffers from many of the same problems but since it's essentially a rehash of Fable 2, gameplay-wise, the same forgiveness cannot be afforded to it as these problems should have been fixed. While it is still a fun game, with an interesting twist halfway through, the many niggling things that plagued Fable 2 are even more glaring this time around and completely ruin the experience on more than one occasion.
The storyline is simple, you are the brother of the king, who has become a tyrant, ruling over the land with an iron fist. After he forces you to choose between killing your lover, or innocent protesters, you decide it's time to take the throne. To do this, you must gain the support of villages outside the castle, making promises to each one before moving onto the next. The twist comes halfway through when you actually take the throne and must keep these promises. Keeping the promises though comes at the expense of the lives of those in your kingdom as a greater evil is coming, and you can only afford to either keep the people happy now, or save their lives later.
This is where one of the games major flaws comes in. This concept itself is fascinating and really had me worried until I realized I could just buy property, make heaps of money and have it both ways. The game gives you a timeline of one year to satisfy your promises, and raise money to save the lives of the people. However, the one year you are given is completely independant of the actual in-game clock (it's tied to missions) so instead of feeling like time is running out, you can just stuff around making money for as long as you like. Many other elements in the game feel just as sloppy and half-arsed as this. There are great ideas at play, but none of them are very well executed or feel like anything more than superficial elements.
A large emphasis is placed on interacting with people but you'll soon grow tired of the same 3 expressions the game lets you use. There's only do much dancing, farting and chicken dancing that I could be bothered doing, and the missions you have to do to become peoples friends never feel different from one-another. Marriage is equally as dull as you cannot customize anything about your spouse. I ended up marrying my maid, and afterwards, she was still dressed as a maid, cleaning the castle with the other maids, and acting no different than before. Somehow one would think that if the king married someone, he could offer them nicer clothes and let them quit their job.
As I said, it's all very superficial. Everything the game touts as role playing elements don't hold up under closer inspection. Even the combat feels sloppy, with over 100 weapons to choose from, none of them feel different from eachother. The magic spells feel the same as well, only offering very minor differences so there's really no reason to choose one over the other. That said, the combat can still be satisfying and the game is still fun on a very basic level, but it doesn't offer much more than other basic action-adventure games. Had all of these elements been stripped away and the core mechanics tightened, it might have seemed a little more fun.
In the end, Fable 3 is the same game you've already played twice, but somehow feels like a step backwards. For all of Peter Molynuex's promises, he once again has provided an average game that isn't broken, it just leaves you wanting more. The gameplay is fine, and the story has some nice twists, but the role playing elements are weak, and the whole thing might have worked better had it been simplified, rather than overcrowded with superficial elements.
6/10
The storyline is simple, you are the brother of the king, who has become a tyrant, ruling over the land with an iron fist. After he forces you to choose between killing your lover, or innocent protesters, you decide it's time to take the throne. To do this, you must gain the support of villages outside the castle, making promises to each one before moving onto the next. The twist comes halfway through when you actually take the throne and must keep these promises. Keeping the promises though comes at the expense of the lives of those in your kingdom as a greater evil is coming, and you can only afford to either keep the people happy now, or save their lives later.
This is where one of the games major flaws comes in. This concept itself is fascinating and really had me worried until I realized I could just buy property, make heaps of money and have it both ways. The game gives you a timeline of one year to satisfy your promises, and raise money to save the lives of the people. However, the one year you are given is completely independant of the actual in-game clock (it's tied to missions) so instead of feeling like time is running out, you can just stuff around making money for as long as you like. Many other elements in the game feel just as sloppy and half-arsed as this. There are great ideas at play, but none of them are very well executed or feel like anything more than superficial elements.
A large emphasis is placed on interacting with people but you'll soon grow tired of the same 3 expressions the game lets you use. There's only do much dancing, farting and chicken dancing that I could be bothered doing, and the missions you have to do to become peoples friends never feel different from one-another. Marriage is equally as dull as you cannot customize anything about your spouse. I ended up marrying my maid, and afterwards, she was still dressed as a maid, cleaning the castle with the other maids, and acting no different than before. Somehow one would think that if the king married someone, he could offer them nicer clothes and let them quit their job.
As I said, it's all very superficial. Everything the game touts as role playing elements don't hold up under closer inspection. Even the combat feels sloppy, with over 100 weapons to choose from, none of them feel different from eachother. The magic spells feel the same as well, only offering very minor differences so there's really no reason to choose one over the other. That said, the combat can still be satisfying and the game is still fun on a very basic level, but it doesn't offer much more than other basic action-adventure games. Had all of these elements been stripped away and the core mechanics tightened, it might have seemed a little more fun.
In the end, Fable 3 is the same game you've already played twice, but somehow feels like a step backwards. For all of Peter Molynuex's promises, he once again has provided an average game that isn't broken, it just leaves you wanting more. The gameplay is fine, and the story has some nice twists, but the role playing elements are weak, and the whole thing might have worked better had it been simplified, rather than overcrowded with superficial elements.
6/10
