I picked up Fable II just after xmas and after 30+ hours of game play I’m ready to review this awesome game. I never played the first Fable game and it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference at all, aside from some small bits of lore. Same as the first game you start out as a young boy or girl this time. The first hour or so is spent doing small time quests with your sister to earn five gold coins to buy a musical wish box and to learn the ropes of the game. I love tutorials like this that well don’t really feel like tutorials, learning how to play a game should always be enjoyable and not painful.
I decided to go with a good character on my first play through because that seemed like the harder option and I was right. Being evil is rather easy but going with a good character takes some real effort. Getting my purity up to 100% was probably the hardest thing until I worked out that buying a few houses and putting the rent down by 100% would send your purity skyrocketing( I did this with the caravans in the gypsy camp). Becoming 100% good was easier, just do the right thing in quests and donate your extra gold to the temple of light.
The best thing about this game is how your character changes as your progress depending on your actions and how you fight. If you use your melee attack a lot you will look more buff, if you use your gun/skill attacks a lot you will grow taller and finally if you are a heavy magic user you will get blue veins. At the moment I’ve got a very buff, tall guy with bright blue veins, it’s not really hard to max out all threeof the different combat branches, magic being the easiest with AoE (Area of Effect) attacks. It would most likely be harder if you just picked one type of combat style and stuck to it, but then game only really gives you XP (Experience) bonuses if you use all two or more styles.
I’ve found the main story line to be somewhat dull aside from rescuing the hero of skill. The side quests are fairly amusing but fairly short, most dungeons seem to be less than ten rooms and you can breeze through them in under ten minutes. I would of loved some huge dungeons crawls in this game, but having quests you can do in 10-15 minutes is great for my weekday morning game sessions.
The only realy thing I dispise in this game is the god awful menu system. If you want to go eat a item from your inventory you have to bring it up then click through a maybe 3 screens then select the item to eat it and then you’re out of the menu and have to repeat the whole process over again. I find this really annoying as Fable II is such a well made game in every other aspect. I forgot the map completely sucks as well, but that nifty glowing trail does make up for it somewhat.
So I’m giving Fable II
9.0/10
I’d recommend this game to anyone who likes action rpgs or wants a medieval style grand theft auto.
