SixString on Fable 3

Fable 3 is, as you’ve probably guessed by the decidedly apt name, the third instalment of the Fable series and I must say now that Mr Molyneux has rather outdone himself, though this isn’t really a particularly bold statement as the previous game was, in comparison to the first, shite. However, the afore mentioned Big Pete has outwardly admitted this and attributed it to schoolboy errors on his part in a way proving further that outlining the fact that one cocked up does not excuse the fact that one did indeed cock up. However, while the survival instincts of a lemming P-dog may have it has not stopped him from gleefully shooting thick sticky wads of hype onto his new game with the ruthless vigour of the last man on earth after having wolfed a jumbo rhino horn and tiger penis smoothie and some of these features work, the Sanctuary system being a particularly engaging way to go about managing your game and despite it being intolerably slow at some points I found the 3D surroundings a fun new experience. However most of the new or revamped features in the game have either been completely unnecessary- in the case of the weapon development for example; a polished turd that I will come onto shortly- or decidedly unre-vamped; with most actually seeming to be worse than in Fable 2. For example the combat system.

The combat system in Fable 3 seems to have been designed to infuriate the player. The most fun element in previous Fable games was peeling away the faces of your enemies with a sword that wouldn't look out of place in a Se7en most painful plastic phallus competition, but this has been removed and instead you are given a rather bland looking sword which serves only to discourage you from using it. Not that you'd want to anyway because the melee combat is so crap that you are practically forced to use the most game-breaking element of the combat. Magic has become so drastically overpowered that you almost feel guilty about sliding your thumb over the B button, otherwise known as the big red nuclear bomb of death button. This was supposed to be balanced by having to charge up spells but once you've spent a trivial amount of the games levelling currency, Guild Seals, this is sidestepped entirely and the most powerful spells can be charged in a matter of nanoseconds, rendering any other weapon useless. Of course, destroying hyperquadrabolillions of enemies at a time might be fun if the spells didn't end up being quite so monotonous. Sure, watching several fat munchkins all of whom resemble the biscuit they are so clearly named after spin around and die in a tornado of flames is entertaining the first few times but when you are forced to do it again and again it becomes an experience akin to eating damp cardboard.

"But why are you forced to use magic," I hear you cry, "surely the other weapons can't be that bad?" This may be so and once you play the game for a few hours some new more interesting weapons become available, however the real problem lies not in the weapon design but in the controls, which were supposed to be simple enough to allow supreme accessibility; which would be fine if they actually worked but it seems that your hero - imaginatively named Hero - has to fill out a permission form then wait for 4-6 weeks for clearance in between the act of pressing the melee attack button and our 'Hero' actually bloody attacking. As you can imagine this causes several moments of frustration particularly when I try to dismember a shambling skeleton only to discover that that the skinless halfwit can actually swing it's weapon faster than me meaning that I end up with a face full of steel sharpened by the hatred of a thousand years of burial. BUT WAIT. It's not just one face full of hatred-sharpened steel, it's about fifteen because the first face-peeling leaves you in a stun-lock only marginally too long to recover and dodge roll before several other shambling lumps of cannon fodder leave you looking like Frankenstein's monster only with more scars.

On the other hand the guns in Fable 3 are actually remarkable good, one particular favourite movement of mine being to shoot an enemy over my shoulder then turning and really messing up his day with - and this is where I jump gleefully back to the first hand like Batman on speed -  a fireball to the face. And that's the main problem with guns, they are good and can kill things well but why would you press one button several times to kill one thing when you can kill several more things at the same time many times faster by pressing one different button once.

It's not as if the game makes doing this any prettier than in previous games, in fact if anything it's less pretty because although the graphics are marginally superior to Fable 2 the world has been infested with bland looking factories filled with equally bland child labourers and adult labourers...so... labourers, SHUT UP. And though there are some nice looking places - for example Millfields - to run through, unfortunately running through is exactly what you will be doing because no major quests happen in these places; forcing you stick with the dull greys and occasionally (wait for it) browns, of the industrial areas. The general excuse for this lack of inherent Fable-ness is that the story is supposed to be grittier than previous Fables but not only is this utter bullshit as the so called grit happens to be on equal terms with a grandmother being hit on the head with a Frisbee it is also completely laughable. Adding grit to a Fable game is like adding grit to the surface of your bed; it may be a new and interesting experience but it is by no means a particularly pleasant or appealing one either.

Anyway, now we come on to the polished turd of weapon morphing that I mentioned earlier, a little less shortly than specifically mentioned but what the who it’s your time I’m wasting and for all I know you hate me with the white hot intensity of a thousand burning suns so SCREW YOU. Ahem, the weapon morphing was gleefully gushed by the P-Man being one of the most unique features in the game even being stated on the box as letting you create a weapon unique to you. Now I was fairly excited by this prospect as I wanted every scummy Hobbe I put six feet under to add another notch to my rapidly growing blade- there’s a psychotic knob joke in there somewhere but beats me if I can find it- however this turned out to not be so; much to my disappointment but not really surprise. You see at any time you have the option to go to the games levelling system from the pause menu. This ‘Road to Rule’ as it’s called is split into many sections each filled with chests. Now as you unlock said chests using Guild seals you unlock abilities and the ones I’m really talking about now are the weapon damage upgrades. If a realisation isn’t hitting you like a ton of bricks right now then either you have skipped ahead to specifically this point in the review or you have been drooling mindlessly into your keyboard for the past few minutes due to a significant lack of mental capacity to both read and keep your saliva in your mouth. Yes, the real way this ‘unique weapon morphing’ occurs is when you get the weapon upgrade which puts a small adjustment onto your blade or gun based on a random achievement you may (or may not, in my experience) have ‘achieved’ and I put achieved in massive inverted commas because the only justification required for example the black weapon colour for killing wolves is for you to kill one wolf. This results in a weapon that is to unique what Slipknot is to jaunty ragtime tunes.

Another feature of Fable 3 that seems to be put in only to piss off the player further would be the ridiculous amount of pathetically trivial side-quests that are rendered even more redundant by the simple fact that the only real reward they give- the levelling currency Guild seals- are so piss easy to obtain in much more fun ways that the only way you would complete them all is that you are in fact the only person in the universe to enjoy obnoxious amounts of fetch quests or you are the very worst kind of completionist; the kind to doggedly pursue even the most trivial of achievements; speaking of which, an achievement is one such thing you most certainly do not get from completing every quest so what’s the bloody point?

The greatest feature in Fable was the ability to continue the game after the actual end credits which was always fun, as being an evil bastard with the best weapons was an infinitely more attractive proposal than attempting to be an evil bastard when even simple guards could hand your ass to you on a silver platter, much to the delight of the townspeople and damage of your ego. Fable 3 takes this to a new level with the ability to become king and gain full control of the kingdom when you dethrone your brother *spoilers* Har-de-har-de-har just kidding this was probably the most advertised feature in the game pre-release and I must say it is a very intriguing idea. Intriguing in the same way that seeing a white-topped dog shit is intriguing because it just seems like a cop-out to disguise the fact that the writer couldn't find an adventure epic or indeed long enough for Albion's newest Hero. And it's not as if you even get "full control" of your kingdom because you are just given a list of arbitrary choices with good, evil or 'middle-ground' options. For example one such choice is to lower taxes, raise them or keep them the same. The problem with this is there are really only two options and with this we come onto the reason I put middle-ground in inverted commas; if you choose the middle-ground option and keep taxes the same the choice is just as unpopular as choosing to raise taxes except if you raise taxes you actually gain money. So one might ask why even put a middle-ground option in anyway and the answer to this question is simple; if they hadn't put it in then people like me would have blasted the 2D moral system for only giving me a straight choice between purely good or purely evil. Thus I am infuriated by the middle-ground option as it proves that the developers have been able to read me like a book and still mess up what were essentially my ideas ... shut up they were.

Strangely enough, I am curiously entertained by this game and I found myself wanting to play to the end right from the start and even after you become king - technically the worst part of the game - it still invites you to play it simply because you want to see how it ends and despite the lack of the promised moral grey areas that surface a grand total of perhaps once over the game the moral choices can be quite involving (with exception of one at the start of the game where you must choose to execute either your childhood friend-I assume as there is no mention that they even really know each other- or a bunch of revolting peasants. The problem being that the actual difficulty in choosing which I should kill came only because I had about the same attachment to each as I would a ham sandwich) any way back to my actual point the moral choices are quite involving especially as choosing either one or the other will actually change the look of the game world which has been promised by so many other games that failed to deliver and so I feel that in the interest of fairness I should probably give this game a decent rating or risk being punched repeatedly in the balls by the hypocrisy hating people of the world. That is to say, YOU.

This has been Zach 'SixString' Sivell, thanks for visiting. :)