OXCGN’s Fable III Review: A Treasure or Trash?

Talking ’bout a revolution?

by Allegionary

©2010 Alex Hilton

Albion is full of sparkling treasure and filthy pollution, shimmering lakes and foul factories, heroic leaders and tyrannical monarchs. This is the world of Fable 3 and in this game you decide to either heroically save Albion or let it fall into darkness…

Fable 3 is developed by Lionhead Studios and published by Microsoft and is an innovative third instalment in the Fable series. Fable 1 and 2 both had their own unique features and Fable 3 is no different. The main difference is that in Fable 3 you get to be King of Albion.

You start as a prince or princess who is the son or daughter of Fable 2‘s hero,  in an industrialised Albion. Right at the start of the game you are confronted with a hard decision.

Your brother, who is the tyrannical King of Albion, forces you to make the hardest decision; the decision on who lives and who dies. After this decision you vow to make your brother pay for the death that was caused and you decide to start a revolution.

• Fable III Release Trailer

As you progress through the game there are many more decisions to make and luckily not all of them are hard ones like your first. Throughout the main story you collect supporters to your cause and travel down the mystical Road to Rule.

While on this exciting journey you open chests found on the Road to Rule that increase your combat effectiveness, unlock expressions to use with the people or to become better at performing different jobs. To unlock these chests you use guild seals. You get these guild seals by slaying enemies, completing quests or going forward in the main storyline.

Collecting supporters for your revolution is not always easy. Sometimes you just have to promise to help them but other times you will have to perform small tasks that increase your standing with the common people. As you collect more followers, more areas of the Road to Rule become available until you reach Bowerstone Castle, Albion’s capital at the end of the road.

Once you overthrow your brother the game proceeds at a fast rate. For example there was no real challenging battle for you to partake in to take the crown. You are pretty much given the crown and forced to make a small amount of decisions as the King.

These decisions aren’t always easy, and you have to break some promises and/or test your moral standing. I would have loved to have more time making decisions as the King, as it was new, enjoyable and sometimes stressful. I don’t know why the decisions you can make as king are cut so short.

After the main story decisions play out you are pretty much just a wanderer again, even if you are king.

A disappointment is that there are some scripting glitches in Fable 3. Doors opened before they were supposed to and the combat sequence occasionally wouldn’t start which was frustrating at times because you had to sometimes load another game or restart your console before it would work again.

• Fable III Trailer

Going on to a more positive point, the combat system is simple but enjoyable. Mashing buttons and rolling away from the enemies is a thrill and I have always liked how the Fable series has a simple and easy to understand control scheme. X is melee attack, Y is ranged attack and B is magic attack. This simple control scheme is why the combat is so fun.

Another aspect that adds to the approachability of the game is the menu screens. There is none. There is no flicking through menus for hours like in other role-playing games (RPGs); instead you walk around the sanctuary, entering different rooms for different menus.

There is a dressing room for changing your clothes, an armoury for changing your weapons, a treasury for showing off your wealth and trophies and an Xbox Live room to download content or to play multiplayer.

The multiplayer in Fable 3 is a big improvement on Fable 2′s. To be able to enter a friend’s world as your own character is a welcome change. Also you may even become business partners with your friend or maybe even marry them. This helps to make your Albion seem unique.

Fable 3 has a very good customization side as well. You can name your treasure-hunting dog and your weapon changes as you use it. For example if you dig for treasure a lot your weapon will have a sparkling gold aura or if you enjoy killing then your weapon will have blood dripping from the blade with a red aura.

You can also make your weapons do more damage and look better by opening their respective chests on the Road to Rule. There is also  a new way of casting spells in that you can weave two spells together to create a unique powerful spell which adds to the customization available for combat.

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Fable 3 rewards you for your efforts in the game, whether you spend lots of hours in Fable 3 or just finish the main quest. If you finish the main quest then you are rewarded with the king’s uniform for your Xbox Live Avatar or if you explore everything then high value achievements will come your way.

Also to help you collect these achievements there is an ‘achievement tracker’ which tells you how many more kills or how many more times you need to dig before you get your award.

Albion is not the most spectacular land on the graphics scale but it is vast and exploration of Albion can take hours. The models of the characters don’t have the greatest detail but that is expected in a Fable game.  Cool matrix-style slow motion closeups of killing animations make you feel the movements of the hero when you pull off an amazing flurry.

The animations for talking don’t always keep in time with the sound though. However, Fable 3 has very good voice acting that makes the characters seem real, which is very important in a good RPG.

Fable 3 does include things that were in Fable 1 and 2. Demon doors do exist for the heroes who like finding ways to open them and the job system from Fable 2 is different but still present. There are only three jobs which are a series of quick time events that are the same for each job.

You press A,X and Y in time with the bar at the bottom and you will earn money.  Money is necessary to buy property (almost any place is for sale), weapons, donate to beggars, and literally to save the world.

Fable 3 is a game that provides the player with a huge world of opportunity to perform different tasks from going to work everyday as a blacksmith, to getting married and having children, to running around Albion finding silver keys and opening treasure chests or to running the revolution or kingdom.

It belongs in the treasury where Fable 2 should have been; it smoothed out the flaws of second game and created a truly wonderful  experience full of diverse yet stressful decisions. Will you create a memorable fable or a fearsome legend?

It just would have been made more impressive if you were King for a longer time.

Though tempted to give Fable 3 an 8.5 because of the main story length and the scripting glitches, I gave it a 9 because the game is so fun and able to be played more than once.

“9/10

©2010 Alex Hilton

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