Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Fable II

1. Official Site
2. Platform: 360
3. Publisher: Microsoft
4. Developer: Lionhead Studios
5. Release Date: 10/21/08
6. Genre: RPG

by Tim Steffes

A friend of mine summed up Fable 2 as this: “A game comprised of easter eggs with a main story quest every now and then.” After spending nearly 18 hours with the game, I’m going to have to say that I completely agree with him. Fable 2 is one of those rare games where you make your own experiences, and your choice of playstyle can drastically change your perspective of the game. If you charge right through, odds are you’ll hate it. If you instead take your time and explore every nook and cranny, you’ll fall in love with it.

Let’s take a look at the scoring breakdown, shall we?

Graphically, Fable 2 is impressive to look at. The world itself is bright and colorful, and is almost peaceful to look at. Barring obstructions, you can easily see from one end of each ‘zone’ to the other. This in turn gives you some beautiful vistas when you look down upon the land. The towns hold the same level of detail, with each building having their own specific layout, as well as furniture within. The townspeople each have their own individual looks, and not the usual clone army that tends to populate most games of this type.

That said, the game is also capable of displaying some rather depressing and ominous environments when it wants to. Rain will patter all around you while you travel through some of the early areas, and one of the later towns looks to be the exact opposite as to how nice the main town looks. And then the Spire…that just looks downright evil.

Magic is an impressive display of visual power, and it looks so good, I’m not surprised that the townspeople are afraid of it. Your Shock spell will continue to spark around its target, while your Inferno spell will light small trees (as well as creatures) on fire. The Raise Dead spell I found particularly impressive – you bring these ghostly essences to life that look far more threatening than they really are. Bonus points to how they take the form of recently defeated enemies when you cast it.

Are there any downsides to the game’s visuals? Unfortunately, while Fable 2’s framerate remains pretty solid most of the time, you will see the occasional burst of slowdown. It happens infrequently enough that you’ll be surprised by it, but it’s something that never caused me real problems.

My bigger gripe is how your character changes as you use your skills. By the end of the game, you’ll look like a huge person with muscles rippling everywhere, and you’ll have blue magic lines visible on each limb. This isn’t too bad on a male (short of how you look like a reject from the Blue Man Group), but on a female, you look like you belong in American Gladiators or something. I understand why it happens, but you no longer look like you should be a housewife or something.

Fable 2’s soundtrack, while nothing that you’ll be humming long after playing the game, is something that works very well. For the most part, it stays out of your way, only to fully ramp up once something interesting happens (usually combat). Otherwise, the music fits what’s going on – peaceful during exploration and aggressive during combat.

The voice acting is what the devs need to be commended upon. There’s a serious amount of humor in the game, and the characters and their inflections as they say what they do make it come alive. This is one of those games where you want to listen to what everybody has to say, as there’s usually something funny or completely off the wall about it. And don’t even get me started on the crazy Bard you can hire for a couple of gold that’ll sing out your latest exploits to the townspeople…

Additionally, whenever you return to town, you know you’ll have a smile on your face as the townspeople all wander up your way, commenting upon this or that about you. You can drastically change their moods with your emotions, and thus change what they have to say. The kids that run around town are a riot though – they’ll chase after each other with imaginary swords, talking about being the Hero, and they’ll come up to you and ask for your autograph and such.

The devs tried something a bit different with Fable 2 – more or less one button combat. X involves everything with your sword. Push it to swing, push it repeatedly to combo attack, and hold it to charge up a power attack (and block). Y involves everything with your ranged weapon. Push it to fire from your hip, hold it to take careful aim, and hold it longer to zoom in on your target for extra damage.

B is your magic button. Tapping it fires off your first level spell nearly instantly, while holding it down charges your magic up to 5 levels. It takes progressively longer to work your way up the spell chain, and each level does a ton more damage than the previous one. A is your all-purpose button – you’ll talk, pick up items, vault over railings, etc.

Left Trigger is your zoom and focus button. You’ll lock on targets with this, and you can use it with Y to be able to target individual body parts of an enemy (once you gain the required skill). Right Trigger picks up all the experience orbs that drop after combat, and you can use it to change your spells mid-battle (but I highly recommend going into the pause menu and change it that way instead).

Right Bumper takes care of your emotion listing. Do you want to wave to somebody, pull out your lute to strum it, play games with your dog, or tell somebody to shove it? You’ll find all that and much, much more under that button. Finally, the D-pad uses items.

While the controls work quite well, there needed to be for lack of a better term a ‘safety’ on casting magic while in town. You’ll use B to cancel out of conversations and such, and if you push it too much, you’ll start casting a spell, which scares the daylights out of the townspeople. It doesn’t do too much damage (nor can you normally injure/kill the townspeople via that method), but there’s no way of aborting your action at that point that I know of.

Additionally, using items while in combat is a crapshoot at best. The game seems to randomly put potions and food items on different positions of the d-pad for reasons I couldn’t figure out. Sometimes it was Left, other times it was Right. And it always seemed to pick the food that had ‘penalties’ for using, instead of things like healing potions, on the hotbars.

To preface the Gameplay section, I want to make this clear – Fable 2 is one of those games that rewards you for putting time into it. While the main quest could be completed in less than 10 hours if you rush right through it, it loses a lot of its charm in doing so. Only by actually getting into the world, doing the many side quests, and participating in the real estate business will you get your full $60 worth out this title. Thankfully, the game easily draws you in as you do this, so you’ll have lots of fun in doing so.

So, what exactly can you do in Fable 2? You can fight bandits. You can purchase up property. You can get married. You can impress the townspeople. You can work on the main quests. You can hunt Gargoyles. You can get married (again). You can treasure hunt with your dog. You can craft weapons. You can find the perfect outfit to wear. You can serve alcohol. You can have a kid. You can do one of the many side quests. You can chop wood. You can rent out property. You can get a divorce. You can scare the locals. You can purchase furniture and put it in your home. You can slaughter the locals. And do much more.

So, yes, there are just a slight number of things you can do. However, to keep the length of this review down, I won’t be listing everything.

For starters, the single button combat works extremely well. It’s very responsive, and very easy to chain a combo of swinging your sword, firing off your gun, and then unleashing a magic attack in a quick series of button presses. While it doesn’t let you get too terribly fancy in combat, it is a ton of fun. There’s just something wrong with unleashing a series of punishing headshots on your opponents while the world has been affected with a localized Time Slow.

Being able to purchase property is a fun side quest of its own in the game. See, as in real life, everything revolves around money. One of the best ways to get money is to purchase property. Then, assuming you aren’t living in it, you’ll be able to rent it back out to the original owners. You can even charge them more money than they were paying before. It’s fun being corrupt, no?

But don’t worry – that money has plenty of uses. From being able to purchase new weapons, clothing, and potions, to purchasing even more property, there’s always a use for the funds you gather. In an unusual move, you’ll continue to gain money (albeit at a reduced rate) even when your console is off. Having not played in a few days, I’m curious as to how much money I have sitting in my bank account right now.

Money has one bigger use, short of property – getting hooked up with somebody else. You want a wife (or husband) and kid? Want multiple wives? Go right ahead. You just need to woo somebody and get a place to live. Of course, you’ll need to keep your wife happy, so be sure to stop by every so often and give her a gift or two. Also, fling a few emotions her way too, just to show that you love her.

Yeah, there’s a storyline buried in the game, too, but it’s just so much fun to wander off the proverbial beaten path and see what the game has to offer. Basically you’ll make some serious decisions which will affect the world around you, in addition to yourself. Will you save the populace and possibly sacrifice your own well being? Or are you number one when it comes to how things go down? That’s entirely up to you.

Finally, there are a few small issues. For starters, combat almost seems a bit easy once you get properly geared (and magicked) up. Past about the halfway point, I had many ways to off anybody that got near me. I could fire a few pinpoint shots and their heads (tending to kill my target instantly). I could fire off my favorite combo of Raise Dead, Time Slow, and then Shock or Inferno and cause total devastation. Or I could just get into melee and chop them to pieces. And I rarely felt threatened by anybody that got near me.

Additionally, the camera has a few nagging issues where you have to take full control of it in order for it to do anything useful. Unfortunately, if you fire up co-op mode, you’re forced to let the game take total control of the camera, as that ability is disabled for reasons I can’t fathom.

Is either of these serious issues? No. The game is just too much fun to let these little things get in the way.

During the course of the game, I put in approximately 64268 seconds (or about 17.85 hours). At the point I put the game down to write this review, I still had multiple quests open, and I guess that I could’ve easily put another 10 hours or so in to finish up the many loose ends out there.

Additionally, there’s nothing stopping you from starting over and changing your morality choices. Want to be the world’s savior? Want to turn into an evil dictator that rules with an iron fist? Or perhaps you’re somewhere between? Go right ahead – the game supports them all. Just remember that all decisions are final. There’s no reloading an old save.

Finally, if you’re an Achievement hunter, you’ll need to beat the game at least 3 different times to get all the points. The three different ‘endings’ all correspond to an irreversible choice you make at the very end. And since there’s no way to simply restore your last save and make a different choice…

Thankfully there are more than enough hidden treasures, secrets, and ways to play that you won’t find the additional playthroughs at all boring. Without a strategy guide right next to you, you’ll never find everything the game has to offer. And it has a lot to offer.

Gaming Trend Score

92

1. Graphics: 92
2. Audio: 95
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 92
5. Value/Replay: 95
6. OVERALL:92