Fable 2 Review: Meh

I almost never purchase games the day they come out, and for good reason! The hype machine around most of these games is so big now that it’s hard to tell the crap from the gold. I personally don’t like throwing $60 out the window and for whatever reason I just don’t rent games much anymore. But regardless of this, I went out and purchased Fable 2 for the Xbox 360 the day it was released. Yet, once again the hype engine overpromised and underdelivered.

I didn’t play Fable 1, so I wasn’t fully sure what to expect. Fable 2 is a cool game. It’s an Action/RPG game much in the style of the Zelda series. The main difference with Fable however is that it takes the Zelda ideas and throws the ability to do bad things into the mix and kicks everything up to a much more adult level. Oh and you have a dog that helps you dig holes in the ground and occasionally finishes off an enemy.

The game has a fun graphical style, but it doesn’t feel all that “next generation” to me as Metal Gear Solid 4 did. There are plenty of glitches graphically. Leaving the menu system normally reveals this, as the screen looks as if its at some 8-bit console resolution for a few seconds.

The music is forgetable. I literally can’t recall a single song in my head. Yet I can almost transcribe music from many of the Final Fantasy and Zelda games from memory. It’s not bad, just nothing memorable.

The play control is pretty damn good. I was wary of the simplified combat, but then I remember that is exactly what Zelda had and it worked perfectly. Jumping, as in Zelda is generally only when you’re at an edge/trigger point.

So with those things being good about the game what is weak? LOTS! I don’t think any major gaming publication has covered this well. I guess they were paid off. Big shock there.

Flaws:

1. Bugs, bugs bugs. I feel very honestly that this game was pushed out before it was done. Another 3 months and it could have rocked. There are parts that simply aren’t play tested, aren’t smoothed out and stick out horridly. In any other game these could be acceptable, but this was supposed to be one of the biggest games ever. Hype machine wins.
2. Co-Op play is a hack: I don’t know what they were thinking. Co-Op play is stupid, useless and broken. You find your friends and join in as a henchman. You can see their character but they can’t see yours. You run around and kill stuff even faster than before. Oh, and the camera goes fixed-angle. If the entire game was like this it would be an outright bad game.
3. It is too easy! : First, there is zero consequence to dying. There are no ‘lives’, no ‘continue’ button you have to hit, and no resetting to the beginning of a section. When you die, you fall over for a second… lose a bit of experience (5% of unused experience?)  and then come back with full life and keep hacking away. I think you a chance of having a ’scar’ too, but who cares?

   On top of that, there is zero challenge. No enemies except trolls (only 3 or so of in the game) have difficult timing. None of them have special attacks that matter, and the AI might have been better on a NES system. This is 2008, the enemies need to work together, react, have tactics, use the environment and generally make you hate them. I’d say that this was one of the easiest games I’ve ever played

4. The dog was useless: I felt a bigger connection with my horse in SotC, or with my Blob in “A Boy and His Blob” from 20 years ago. The dog did nothing for me. There were no quests related to him. He couldn’t die, so you never cared to defend him. He just found random treasure. He was useless in battle. Getting him to do tricks wasn’t fun. I had more fun with a tamagotchi or neopet.
5. The economy got broke really quick: Once you found out how to make a bit of money chopping wood, and you bought a few places you were set.
6. They introduced MMO style grinding: The endgame stuff was all MMO style grinding. Who cared about getting 1,000,000 gold to buy the castle. Nothing happened when you did. You didn’t have to defend it or anything. Even with a broken economy 1,000,000 gold was a lot to get and very pointless. Negative points to any single player game that does this.
7. The plot sucked: The guys at work told me that I shouldn’t have expected a great plot from this. Zelda’s plot was simple so maybe I should cut it some slack, but as soon as I heard “choice” in a game I thought of the choices having as much bearing on the game as they did in Chronotrigger. Yet, no. The “end game” choice that you make is silly and there’s only one sane choice of the three. While I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, the plot is EXACTLY what they lady at the beginning tells you. Go find three ‘heros’, and beat the bad guy. That’s it.
8. Love is stupid: Even though as far as I remember Zelda and Link never got their groove on, I always felt a strong draw towards finding the princess. Yet in this game, getting married to a random villager takes all of 5 minutes, and has little bearing on the game. Yea, they give you stuff. Whatever. I felt nothing in the relationship. Zero depth.
9. You can’t sacrifice children: At one point in the game you can sacrifice people to an evil temple. Yet you can’t take the children there. Blah. If I am able to play evil in the game I want to be able to be SUPER evil.
10. No Blood: I’m not expecting a gory game, but its just cool to see a bit of splatter here and there, even if just to illustrate the type of weapon I use.
11. Magic was boring: I found the entire magic system to bore me. I used “Fire” for the entire game, and it was generally wear compared to my sword, slow, and a liability. I tried some of the other abilities but there was nothing inventive there.
12. The inventory menus sucked: Nuff said. Taking potions took forever. The ‘clothing’ system was a joke. Play tested? I think not.
13. Zero consequence: No matter how many villagers I slaughtered, or what I did… the world kept going. The people of Albion must breed like rabbits, because there were always more to kill. They never amassed against me to draw and quarter me. They actually were just a bit resentful or a bit scared. It didn’t feel like the lord of death had entered the room and was about to end them if they stopped facing perfectly North, or if I forgot which was North was. In Grand Theft Auto the police WILL end you if you act up too much. That’s part of the fun.
14. Too short: I can’t remember the last game I beat this fast. Seriously.

They however did a few really cool things right:

1. The world around you: You could hear the world around you. Not as in creatures and stuff, but you can turn it on so that you hear every other person playing the game nearby you over XBL! It made a single player game into a cool multiplayer situation, like you were sitting in a room with 100 friends all playing the same sections. Very cool. Very fun.
2. Debauchery and wrongness: I wasn’t a “good” guy in the game. I cheated on my wife. I had two wifes. I had threesomes with hookers, no condoms. I think one was a man. I got STDs (I wish there was some consequence from this asides from just the number. Shouldn’t i go blind or at least spread them back to my wife?). I dugg up a lady’s body parts from graves for her sick lover. He raised her from the dead and she fell in love with me. I married her, had sex, had a child, and then since she was a bitch I sacrificed her to the Temple of Shadows. Fun stuff. And then I came back to my normal family and acted like nothing was wrong. Oh, and I killed a few hundred villagers because there didn’t jump when I walked by. And the guards too. In fact, why did I “save the world” asides from to save my own ass. If I was really evil I’d have simply taken over and pulled the switch myself.
3. Just Fun: Despite being a broken game on many levels, it was pretty fun and I did play all the way through.

Overall, it wasn’t the 10/10 A++ game that many places had billed it was. It was a 7.5/10. This isn’t the new Zelda. This isn’t the new Chronotrigger. My number 1 place to kill hookers is still Liberty City. And if i want good roleplaying storyline there is still always Baldur’s Gate. Well worth playing, but nothing like they said it would be.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.