Fable II

THE BAD:
-Cutscenes
-Dialogue
-Combat
-Too Easy

SUMMARY:
Fable 2 is, overall a great game, look past the hype and all the promise that Peter Molyneux made and you will see the true value that is packed into this game. When I first started to play this I was ready to dive right into the action, slay some bandits, shoot some innocent civilians. You can't, before you can do all this you have to play a mini-tutorial/storyline set-up for around ten minutes. This bored the hell out of me, running around with a wooden sword and a toy gun doing deeds for gold coins to buy some magic box. Then something terrible happened, just as I was about to get past this, my file glitched and I could not speak to Lucien. I re-loaded the game and could still not speak to him, so my first file had glitched and I had to redo the whole kid section again. By now I was mighty annoyed, I was ranting a little and I really just wanted to get started properly.

From here on in though the game really picks up, we see more storyline unfold (Pretty un-original, revenge and all that stuff). We are then shoved into a little cave where we fight with sword and crossbow to get to a little room in the centre. Here our will is activated (Basically magic) you then learn about the experience system. To break it down into simple terms you get strength experience for doing damage with your sword, skill experience for using your range weapon and will for using magic. You can spend this experience in its respective categories, you also get general experience when your enemies die by your hands. This can be spent in any of the three categories. The experience system is a little more complicated than this, depending on how well you kill your enemies, the more experience you get for the kill. For instance say I hack a bandit to their doom I will get normal experience. Yet if I shoot him with a fireball, roll in for a few swipes of my sword, then roll back and fire a few rounds from my rifle I might get a 200% bonus on my experience. The game rewards use of all aspects of the combat triangle.

Now with the great experience system you would expect the combat to be amazing, well to be honest, it is not that great. It is infact very simple and requires little skill to kill the biggest enemies, all you have to do is tap X to use your sword, Y to use your ranged weapon and B to use magical spells. The only complicated thing in the system is range, if you wish you can lock onto your opponents, but if you want to make it a little harder you can use the aim option to target enemies. Although using this is very hard as it takes away the third person view, resulting in a loss of the ability to see what your enemies are doing. Thus in battle you usually ending up spamming X before holding down B and finishing off your enemies. Nothing is a real challenge to even the weakest warrior and even if you do die, you will just acquire some scars and lose some experience, nothing major.

Luckily for Fable 2 and Lionhead studios combat is only the tip of the iceberg for this game. The mechanics of this game are brilliant, each town has its own economy and reacts differently to every action you make. For instance say I go and wreak havoc all across one town, killing people and committing vandalism, the town's economy would drop drastically. Then I could go around buying property and stalls and wait for the economy to rise back up again. The game also reacts to good actions, for instance I spent a lot of time black-smithing in Bowerstone, earning myself a hefty lump of gold, I then went and acquired a few houses, some new weapons and augments and a lot of potions. Now because of all the gold i poured into the economy it rose drastically, causing the prices of everything to hike. Now this was not very good for me, as it meant that everything was more expensive, but it also meant that I earn more money while black-smithing (Always a plus.) The economy of the game is really diverse and allows you to ride waves of slumps and rises to make yourself incredibly rich.

The quests in this game are pretty basic, they all follow the same story-line in a way, walk somewhere, kill something and become more famous. There are of course a few exceptions and a couple of references to the first game, although I will not spoil these as they are quite funny and you will want to see them for yourselves. The main story line is one of these exceptions, instead of just hacking and slashing like the first one you spend most of it impressing people and trying to gain favour with three heroes, a monk, a mage and an interesting pirate, before going back to the un-original storyline of getting revenge on Lucien.

One of the major let downs of this game was the cut-scenes, I will be honest they were really bad, there are only three or four cut-scenes to the the whole game. The rest of the time you are free to run around and not actually watch them, the dialogue is terrible, one person speaks and then it takes around four seconds before the next speaks. This can be hilarious at times and moment-killing at others, but as a whole it really takes away from the game.

Overall the game is great, you can spend hours in Fable 2 and still not be finished everything. Apart from my few complaints it truly is a game worth buying and one with great replay value.