Published: Monday, 10th November, 2008 10:10
Fable 2
By Narin Bahar
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I should probably declare a bias here. I loved the original Fable game. Even with it failing to live up to developer Peter Molyneux's hype, it was the game I bought my X-Box for, having played it for a brief hour at a friend's house and fallen in love with the epic story and free roaming universe.
The announcement of a sequel filled me with both excitement and terror. It was like meeting a blind date - you feel excited at the possibilities having heard so much about them but worried that the object of your affection will turn out to be a troll. Or possibly a hobbe in this instance.
But rest assured, there's nothing to fear here.
Set 500 years after the original, Fable II is another epic tale of Albion - with your world once more filled with possibilities. Evil Prince Lucian (played by the geek's geek Stephen Fry, who heads up a great cast of voice actors) shatters your life with the kind of malevolent act that will take years to get over. But while you're plotting your revenge you can find your place in the world - are you good or evil? Do you want to set up a property empire? Get married? Get a job? Get a tattoo? You can do all this and more in a beautiful, immersive world where your every decision has an impact on everything else.
You can of course decide your moral path. But whereas the first game was all about the extremes, here it's all in the detail. As well as being good and evil you can be pure or corrupt. If you buy most of the property in the town and then increase the rents 20 per cent with no notice you can save all the fair maidens you like, but you'll get a reputation for corruption. This makes for a lot more depth than the usual kill or rescue type quests as without realising it you can end up with a different reputation to the one you set out for. For example, in order to increase my renown quickly to finish the main quest before writing this review I paid big money to build statues of myself playing the lute in half a dozen villages around Albion. Despite following the path of the light, the villagers all saw me as essentially good but rather vain, although they remained visibly moved by my lute playing skills. And rightly so.
Of course no matter how much the villagers love me - and by the end I had to carry autograph cards around with me to dole out to the overwraught fans - no-one loves you more than your dog. Your humble companion can help you in a fight, unearth treasure, and perform tricks. It's the kind of thing that if it was handled badly would be cheesy indeed, but thankfully your dog - who you can name and train courtesy of books you can buy along the way - is a great addition to the game, with different kinds of barks warning you of nearby enemies, or treasure. Even the stoniest hearts will be clamouring to dig out the elixir to help your poor pup when it's injured defending you from a gang of bandits.
It's just as well with a land as massive as this and so many things to do, that you don't have to spend time finding your way around. A glittering golden path illuminates your way to your main quest at any given time, negating the need to walk past the same tree five times while blundering about to find the next stage of the story. Meanwhile, the fighting system doesn't result in you dying - if you run out of health when set upon by bandits or whatever you're briefly knocked unconscious and then come back to life to keep fighting, although the scars you get as a side effect of your reincarnation mean the vain among you will be doing all you can to avoid such untimely, if temporary, deaths.
There are a few things that are a bit annoying, but they are minor niggles. The main one does concern the trail guiding you to your quest which seems to get confused easily, like a cut price sat nav. Meanwhile some of the fighting gets a bit samey after the while, with all enemies of a particular type reacting in the same way. However, these are the closest to criticisms I can come up with. This is the game your 360 was made for. Buy it now.
Five stars.
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