Fable 2 is horrible

If you value your free time / social life / mate / dog, stay away from Fable 2. It’s an all consuming game that will swallow hours of your life. The game’s depth and charm is just too much for me and I keep coming back to it every chance I get. I’ve neglected Rock Band (which I excitedly purchased a few weeks ago after finding out the Asian version was out in Singapore), Guitar Hero: World Tour, Far Cry 2 (another potential timesink) , just to return to the world of Albion and grind away at Bartending so I can afford to buy out the bar and blacksmith in Bowerstone. Hell I even snuck in a game over the lunch break.

The game is incredibly deep, and very deceptive about it, when you start out the combat feels a little simplistic but once you get more abilities and higher tiered spells, you can then mix up spells, sword combos and your gun to make quick work of your enemies. You could do a time stop spell, then charge up a higher level fire spell to kill everyone around you, or use the confusion spell then slash up your enemies while they’re busy falling in love with you or scrubbing the floor. There’s the breadcrumb trail that feels like a lame crutch at first but actually encourages you to explore the world since you’re assured that you’ll always know where to go should you choose to stop roaming around. Then there’s making money, if you want to make it big in Fable you’ll have to earn those $$$, and there are numerous ways of doing so, you can steal, get a job (bartending, smithing, or do jobs for slavers, etc), extort, and trade. You can then buy businesses or houses to make you more dough. It’s very grindy and MMO-like, this is precisely why I avoid MMO’s, they’re such huge timesinks and I’m afraid I’d get sucked in and lose my life to it, which is what’s happenning with Fable now.

Albion is a very inviting world for you to get lost in. It’s not quite Oblivion in its World size, it’s smaller and more linear, but then again what’s there is usually packed with something to do. There might be a dig spot or a treasure, or twig camouflaged trolls hiding in the next corner, not a lot of wasted space just to make the game look big. The world’s palette is wonderful and varied too, there’s lush vibrant Oakfield, and the dark and foreboding shadow temple. Exploring the world

I could go on, you’ll grow really attached to your dog, the story is top notch, as is the voice acting and the general presentation, playing as an evil asshole is hella fun. Hmm, let me get in a few sentences about being evil. When you feel a little dirty sacrificing your wife to the Temple of Shadows or when you giggle a bit when you can point and laugh at an NPC’s dad’s funeral or listening to the grumbling of the town’s populace when you raise the rent yet again and cackling inside, you know they did evil justice in this game. Other games, even Fable 1, gives you such half-assed options when playing evil that it almost isn’t worth it to play as such. Being evil means taking the easiest, most profitable way out at the expense of others, and this is exactly how it is in Fable.

So yeah, brilliant game, crack on a disc that you should stay away from. And then after this there’s Fallout 3, I am so f’d.

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on Oct 28, 2008