Fable 2 Review: Countless Choices and Options, None of Which are Fun
Fable 2
Score: 5.8
Systems: Xbox 360
Genre: Adventure
Length: 12 hours
Difficulty: 5
Developer: Lionhead Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Release Date: 10/21/08
Pros
- Large variety of skills to upgrade and use in combat
- World is vast and beautiful
Cons
- Combat system is repetitive and easy to manipulate
- Far too many side quests, none of which are fun
- The countless choices have little impact on actual gameplay
- Buying houses, furniture, vegetables and getting jobs don’t belong in games
by Rabid Rabbit
Fable 2 is yet another over-rated game that focuses too much on side quests that simply aren’t fun and leaves the main campaign boring and repetitive. Similar to the distractions that made Metal Gear Solid 4, Spore and Grand Theft Auto IV boring games, Fable 2 gets distracted from providing meaningful and interesting gameplay. Far too much effort was placed on meaningless tasks that don’t materially affect gameplay, such as getting married, choices between good and evil and jobs to earn money. The main campaign involves traversing a large world and fighting a series of non-descript enemies that lack variety. The actual fighting mechanics quickly devolve into button mashing regardless of your preferred method of dispensing with your foes. The end result is a game that strays into many different gameplay elements but never makes any of them particularly fun. The developers simply forgot to make the game fun. Apparently they knew this was a problem when they released a statement asking people to have non-gamers try the game. Apparently it was made for people who don’t know what to demand from a game rather than traditional gamers who have more discerning tastes and demand higher forms of entertainment.
The crux of Fable 2 is choices. The main adventure is littered with a myriad of choices to help or harm people. If you choose to help people, then you are revered by citizens and gain their favor. If you choose the path of the dark side, then people will fear and despise you. It’s amazing that so much time was spent on this gameplay element, but it actually has very little impact on the actual game. The only material effect is how people react to you and evil characters’ complexions will deteriorate into a purple monster with horns. When you go into town, citizens will run in fear from evil heroes and may charge you higher prices for goods. You can reduce any price hikes by simply scaring them into lower prices though.
Any benefits from being a good person can be earned as an evil hero by scaring people or stealing from them as an evil person. There are just different means to the same ends. Without a material impact to your choices other than people calling you a murderer and running from you, it’s really hard to take these choices seriously. The entire system falls apart and becomes more of a nuisance than a unique aspect to tinker with.
The Fable 2 world is vast and includes a number of towns and people to interact with. You can choose to be a law-abiding citizen or you can just kill people for their goods, money and gifts. If you kill people or get caught stealing, then you should expect the police to quickly arrive to keep the peace. They will give you the choice to pay a fine, complete a community service task, or you can resist arrest. The community service is typically just a simple task to help someone or kill some bandits. If you resist arrest, then expect to be constantly chased by guards in town that you must fight.
This entire crime punishment system is extremely easy to circumvent. All you have to do is continually commit to community service tasks that you don’t ever complete. After choosing to complete one of these tasks, the guards will leave you alone and give you a few days to finish your work. If you don’t finish the task, you can simply request another task. The result is that you can do whatever you want in town without ever suffering any negative consequence. The only other noticeable effect is that your reputation follows you to every town you visit and people will fear you and call you a thief or a murderer. For a game so focused on choices, that seems like an easy choice to me: just steal and kill as much as you want without ever getting punished.
There are also a wide variety of choices for how you interact with people in town. You can choose to be nice by telling jokes or complimenting people to gain their favor or you can be mean by insulting them or giving rude gestures to lose their favor. There are also seductive gestures to attract people of the opposite sex. If you show enough interest in someone, then you can eventually propose to them by giving them a ring. After purchasing a house, you will be married to your fiancée. If you have unprotected sex (yes the game actually has condoms to prevent pregnancy and STD transmission), then you will likely have a child.
Like the rest of the game, the entire marriage and family system is extremely simple. The main result of a family is a budget drain on your income. If you keep your spouse happy, then you will get a gift from them when you arrive home from adventuring. You can also name your child. That’s about it. For a system that took so much work to incorporate into the game, you’d hope there would be more to it, such as training your spouse and kid to aid you in your adventures. Nope, there’s nothing like that in this game. If you like this boring gameplay and are a glutton for punishment, you are able to become a polygamist and have more than one family in the world. Like the rest of Fable 2, there isn’t much interesting depth here to keep you coming back for more of these Brady Bunch antics.
Towns offer a wide variety of things to do, but almost all of them either have no point or are extremely boring. You can get a job to make money, but why would you want to do that when you could be fighting monsters and playing the main campaign. We all have jobs, and we leave them to have fun playing games rather than to start another job inside a game. If you choose to take one of these jobs, you will enter a world of hurt involving extremely repetitive tasks that require no skill. As a blacksmith or wood cutter, you are simply timing button presses to a sliding scale. If you become a bar tender, you simply hold down a button to the end of a meter to pour a full glass of beer. None of these tasks ever change no matter how much you get promoted. Other jobs involve fetching people or items, such as the bounty hunter job.
You can also earn money by playing some games. These games mimic real-world games such as craps, card games and slots. A significant amount of effort went into differentiating these games from their real life counterparts. This becomes obvious when you watch the 5 minute tutorials that teach how to play the games. All of the games involve mere chance and require no skill on your part. Why would throwing dice be more interesting than actually playing the game’s main quest? It’s really absurd how much effort went into these games rather than making the main quest more interesting.
A number of possibilities are available in towns. You can choose to steal from merchants. When you attempt to steal, an icon appears to let you know if someone is watching you. If you are seen pilfering the store, then a guard will approach to punish you.
You can also choose to buy a wide variety of food and items with a myriad of different qualities. It’s really perplexing why people would care so much about different grades of meat, fish, pies, fruits and vegetables. There’s even tofu! The only way these different types of food impacts gameplay is that you will gain weight if you eat too many fatty foods, such as meat and pies. However, gaining weight doesn’t change your speed or the amount of damage you do in combat, so why should you care unless you are a narcissist?
You can also buy houses and shops. Then you can change your properties’ rent or the shop item’s selling prices to affect your profits. Other than additional profits, the only impact to raising prices is your alignment becomes more evil. If you decide to live in a house, you can go out and buy furniture, which increases the house’s value. Yes, you can actually choose to spend your free time looking at different grades of furniture in a video game. If that doesn’t put you to sleep, I don’t know what will.
The game also gives you a dog to accompany you through most of your tasks. His main purpose is to help you find buried treasures or hidden treasure that are off the main paths. He can also be trained to improve his treasure sniffing abilities to find more valuable loot than worthless things such as rancid tofu. If you knock an enemy down in a fight, your dog will also pounce on top of him to cause some additional damage.
With so many side quests and distractions, you’d think the game is a social interactions simulator and there weren’t any problems in the world. If you ever get out of town, you’ll realize there is the typical world coming to an end plotline along with an antagonist to stop. Your main objective is to gather three other heroes to combine forces and stop the world from becoming enslaved. The story unfolds through a series of tasks strewn across a large world with various enemies to defeat.
In order to progress through the story and gain new tasks, you must increase your renown throughout the world by helping people. The world of Fable 2 is large and these tasks are scattered across its many locales. To help ensure you don’t get lost trying to find your next task, the game includes a glowing trail for you to follow to your next objective. Once you have traveled to an area, you can choose to save time by letting the game transport you to your destination.
Combat is resolved by defeating enemies with melee fighting mechanics, shooting foes or employing magic. The associated skills of strength, skill and will increase as you use them in combat. Each downed enemy drops experience based on the ability type you use to defeat them. If you perform well in a fight by winning quickly or taking little damage, then you’ll be rewarded bonus experience. Then you can spend the experience to further hone these skills. Increasing some skills can provide new abilities such as sword counters and combos, but most upgrades simply cause more damage or increase your life meter rather than adding any depth.
Strength skills include causing more melee damage, reducing damage you take and increasing your life bar. Skill abilities revolve around improving shooting accuracy, damage and your ability to avoid enemy strikes. Will abilities include a variety of spells.
Direct damage spells hurt enemies with elements, such as fire, electricity, and blades. You can choose to cause more damage to a specific target or distribute your love through an area of effect spell. There are also indirect spells, such as raise dead to summon minions to aid your cause and charm spells to temporarily remove some foes from the fight by confusing them. The magic system is oddly unbalanced. Magic spells are cast without limit because you don’t spend mana points to cast spells. The result is you can just sit back and cast unlimited spells if you create a buffer against enemy attacks, such as summoning a horde of undead creatures with the raise dead spell.
While there are a variety of different abilities, fights generally devolve into simple button mashing. You’ll either madly press buttons to hack and slash with your melee weapons, shoot with your crossbow or gun or continually cast your spells. There’s very little depth in the actual encounters. Almost all enemies are dispatched with the same maneuvers regardless of how different they look. The only exceptions are the large trolls, which have specific weaknesses to target. Most of the campaign involves these repetitive fights, which makes it more of an effort in patience to endure the game’s monotonous encounters rather than having fun.
Most fights are rather easy, but even encounters that may offer a challenge are simple because there is no real consequence to losing a fight. If you run out of health, you are knocked out rather than dying. The only downside to getting KOed is that you will lose any ungathered experience. You can eat food or drink potions to increase your health, but there’s really no point in wasting your time buying the food and eating it. Just make sure to gather any experience if you are low on health and then you won’t lose anything by being knocked out. You’ll be revived to the same fight without having to walk back to the encounter and you won’t waste any money on healing items. So you can just mash buttons without paying attention to your health level because losing a fight has no negative consequence. These ridiculous gameplay elements further reduce the point of the fights and the campaign itself.
There is also the option of join a friend’s campaign in the game’s co-op mode. As with most games, playing the game with a friend can make it more fun. It’s pretty cool that the game is flexible enough that you and your friend don’t even have to be in the same place. You can choose to take on different tasks and not be in each other’s vicinity. While co-op mode generally add to the overall experience, it’s hard to say it makes a huge difference considering it doesn’t fix the game’s numerous other problems.
If you can endure the boring main quest to the end, you are rewarded with a horrid ending. I’m not talking about an ending movie. I won’t give anything away, but it’s important to note that there isn’t a final confrontation. After pouring hours into a boring campaign and exploring mundane side quests, Fable 2 simply continues to underwhelm with a slow boring end to the game that you have little control over. Well, at least the game’s boring features are consistent from its beginning to its ultimate ending.
The game’s vast world includes a wide variety of landscapes. From the dreary swamps to the lush hilly areas to the dark caves lit by torchlight, the world of Fable 2 is a beautiful place to explore. The only downside is that its ambitious long draw distances coupled with numerous enemies do create noticeable framerate hiccups throughout the quest.
Overall, Fable 2 promises a lot. It allows you to explore towns and make many choices. There are many side quests, jobs, businesses to buy and people to interact with, but none of these distractions are interesting. The main quest and its combat system have a wide variety of skills and enemies to fight but none really differentiate themselves from each other. The end result is a game that fails to entertain or involve you regardless of what you are doing in the game. It simply isn’t fun, no matter what you do or what choices you make in its elaborate world.
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Rabid Rabbit
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