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Fable 2: One Paragraph Review

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Fable 2 Scenery

While I enjoyedFable 1, I never finished it. Like many of Lionhead’s games, it fell victim to the overhyping of Peter Molyneux. So whenFable 2 was announced, I watched the reviews carefully before buying. In the end, I thought it sounded interesting enough to give it a shot, and I’m glad I did. Most of the annoying aspects of the first game are gone (in fact, there are several funny references to the “Your health is low” message from the first game), and what’s left is a core of simple, but effective gameplay. Leveling your character is simple enough that you could put plenty of points into whichever discipline you wanted, though like most fantasy RPGs, the game is dramatically easier if you focus on physical strength and swordplay. The world is absolutely beautiful, and even with a fast travel system, I frequently found myself walking between towns to enjoy it. My only complaint in this regard is that they removed the map, so it’s hard to keep track of where the towns are in relation to one another. Best of all, the game has a great storyline. You must gather up several reluctant heroes to prevent the villain from destroying the world. As you progress, you gain fame so that while townspeople are indifferent towards you at first, by the end of the game, they worship the ground you walk on (assuming you play a good character).

I’m going to break my own rule here and add a second paragraph, because in addition to being a fine game on it’s own,Fable 2 made me realize how disappointed I was inFallout 3. I remember the first twoFallout games as being incredibly compelling worlds with clever stories, interesting scenery, and hilariously violent combat. The new version managed to retain the violent combat and some clever story elements, but set it in a next-gen gray and brown world that sucked all the fun out of it. For me, at least. My coworker recently beat the game and absolutely loved it, so maybe this is a personality thing, but I just found the world oppressive after awhile, and stopped caring about it. TheOblivion engine’s mannequin-like faces may have been part of this.Fable 2, in contrast, seems over-saturated and cartoony, like a caricature of medieval life, but because it wasn’t taking itself so seriously, I found it was much more fun to play.

Fallout 3 and Gears 2 Review Followups

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I made the mistake of reviewing bothFallout 3 andGears of War 2 before I had finished them. I tend to play pretty slowly, and I was afraid that if I waited until I beat the games, then the reviews would be pointless. So I played both games for a few hours, and then threw up my first impressions, and in both cases, my first impression of the game was misleading.

In the case ofFallout, I said that the game was clever, and perfectly captured the feel of the original. I stand by the fact that the game is clever — at one point, you have to rescue your dad from a virtual reality he’s been trapped in — and the scope is quite ambitious. But honestly, the graphics really started bugging me.

Everything in the world, literally everything is the same dull gray-brown color. Everything is dusty and dirty and rusty and falling apart. Even when you get to the last bastions of civilization, the color scheme only shifts from dirty gray-brown to clean gunmetal-gray. Frankly, it’s depressing. I get that they’re modeling their future on the photos of Hiroshima after the bomb, with all the wrecked buildings. But this is set 200 years after the bomb! You need look no further than Chernobyl to see that even radiation-savaged land is eventually reclaimed by nature. And when you combine the never ending monochromatic scenery with theOblivion engine’s soulless faces peering out of the uncanny valley, you end up with a game world that I really wanted to love, but couldn’t quite get into.

I didn’t realize how much this bothered me until I started playingFable 2, with its colorful scenery and its stylized characters. I’ll talk more about this when I reviewFable soon, because while the contrast between these games couldn’t be more dramatic, there’s several key points where they overlap, and in every one of them,Fable comes out on top.

And as forGears, I said that it was good, but basically just more of the same. However, just a bit further than I had progressed when I wrote that, the game gets absolutely crazy. While the gameplay is nothing different, and there were a few points where I got frustrated, the sheer scale and insanity of the boss fights more than redeems the game. Plus, I hate to say it, but as thin as the plot normally is, they managed to drop a pretty interesting twist towards the end that has me looking forward to the next installment.