My Fable 2 Review for Zargon

[Surf314]

I hate to admit this but I'm a bit of a follower of Peter Molyneux's work.  I bought both Black & Whites, desperately wanted The Movies but talked myself out of it, and forced myself to enjoy Fable.  It's not that I think that he is the greatest developer in the world, but he always seems to bring fresh ideas to video games and it is something that I enjoy.  The problem with Molyneux's games though is that no matter how much you want to love his games you can't help but being a bit disappointed.

Fable 2 is basically an upgrade of the original Fable.  There are many improvements here: nicer graphics, larger areas, somewhat improved loading times, better combat, and a more robust world.  But it is still Fable.  And with all of these improvements to the original Fable come a host of problems that while not exactly the same, are very similar to what was wrong with Fable 1.  The combat while mostly more enjoyable still suffers some quirks.  Although I originally thought the new magic system was clever I quickly grew to hate it.  Instead of having to spend mana or its equivalent your spells now cost time.  You have to hold the button to increase your spell level (with the ability to assign a spell to each level 1-5).  The problem with this is the first 2-3 levels are next to useless, especially later in the game.  The top two levels are insanely powerful but take so long it will cost you a lot of damage to cast them.  So in most situations you can take much less damage hacking and shooting.  Shooting in this game is a lot of fun but again there is a problem.  You can shoot for normal damage at whoever you are locked onto or you can hold to zoom in.  As you zoom in you get to do greater damage and later in the game you can target different body parts.  This mostly works well but once you zoom in it stops changing your target after you kill the person you are shooting at.  At this point things get very clunky.  You can stay zoomed in and move to the next target manually which feels awkward or you can zoom back out and target someone else which doesn't always worked as planned.  The result of this is I spent a lot of time shooting at no one.

As far as building a robust fantasy world that you can create your own tale of adventure in its got the exact same feel as the first.  It is deep enough to interest you, even to get you excited about exploring it.  But in the end it just misses the mark of creating a thoroughly enjoyable experience.  Buying and selling property can be fun but there isn't much point to it.  Making money is helpful but taking jobs is often boring and repetitive.  Money often isn't even that useful once you start finding legendary weapons.  Once you own enough property money starts flowing in so quickly that you quickly find you don't need anything to spend it on except more property.  The only use of it at the end of the game is to buy the incredibly expensive castle. 

The marriage and children aspect of the game is also pretty interesting.  You can marry, buy a home and raise a family.  Or you can sleep with prostitutes.  You can have orgies and even get STDs if you don't use protection.  This is all very neat and may even be fun at first but you quickly start wondering what the point is.  Your mate will give you gifts periodically if you keep them happy but they are often not any better than you are picking up in your normal questing.  Also there is not a single stand out character in the game that you can actually woo and marry.  All the quests characters that seem like good mates are off limits to you with the exception of one who annoyed me more than anything. 

As for the story itself it is passable but not memorable.  It is pretty standard fair with some stand out moments and some incredibly frustrating ones.  The major problem I had with it is that the writing seems to be torn between open ended choices and black and white choices.  In many inconsequential ways you can do a lot of interesting different things but in the quests it often comes down to a straight down the line good or evil decision with the good decision often coming with immediate penalties.  It makes me upset because with how much this game seems to stress you creating your own Fable these heavy handed morality choices really break that down and make you feel like you are in a story on rails with only two ways of playing, good or evil.  That being said there are a lot of little details built into this game that really add a lot to it.  All your items have clever descriptions.  It's common to find books that are actually worth reading.  It can be quite fun to go into a pub or other location and listen to what people have to say until they start repeating themselves.  The details are nice and would fill out the game and make it a timeless classic if it weren't for the faults in the main quest.

Now after all this you would expect I hated the game, but I actually quite liked it.  Yes there was some awkward combat, the dog was mostly useless, most of the main game missed the mark of expectation and many of the details which make the game enjoyable tend to not have a point to doing them.  But what it really comes down to is Molyneux has talent in one specific area.  Dreaming up the kinds of games I would love to play, and from the sales numbers he gets a lot of other people too.  But he cannot make the game I want to play.  When it really comes down to it I'd rather play something different that fails then something the same that succeeds and that is what Fable 2 is.  You feel like you are playing less of a game and more of a promise.  Buy my games so I can one day take these ideas and do them justice.  But after all of the games I have played by Molyneux I'm starting to lose faith in that promise.  While I don't feel like the money I spent on Fable 2 was wasted I feel less inclined to spend money on his next game.  Molyneux has a lot of work to do to earn back our faith.  He needs to learn how to make a good game or partner with someone that does.

[Surf314]

It's a draft I plan to edit it and put in some more thoughts (and maybe take some out) later.

[rumsfald]

It's a draft I plan to edit it and put in some more COMMAS later.

[Surf314]

=( I have to rearrange a bunch of stuff and break down complex sentences into smaller ones.  Also I wanted to add two ideas: That the game suffers from being too much in the middle, open ended enough not to have a coherent story and linear enough to break the feeling you are in control of the universe.  Also that it feels like Molyneux spent too much time developing the tiny details that are easy to skip over and too little time adding depth to things like combat, the main story, and giving you more paths to complete objectives then just good and evil choices.