There are no spoilers in this review.
I will try to keep this as short as possible. We all have better things to do than read 5,000 words on how a video game is "just okay."
In a game with a higher level of customization than most (and for good reason, since it can be classified as an RPG), story matters, and in the grips of finishing a good story, it would be very easy to give Fable 3 a 5-star rating based solely on the fact that its story is sterling. However, rather simple annoyance hold it back from earning 5 stars.
I have played through the game twice now, and feel like I have absorbed most of what the game has to offer, and so feel comfortable in this review, that I consider fair. I will break down what the game did right by me, and what it did wrong.
>What Fable 3 Did Right<
1. As I mentioned already, thee story is superb. Helped along by
2. The voice acting, and
3. Very well-written secondary characters. Ones that actually have depth. Praise be to whoever wrote the game, and to those who didn't cut the dialog out of fear the player would be bored.
4.Gorgeous vistas and nice graphics. Fable 2 also had some very beautiful visuals, but they pale in comparison to ones contained in this game. It is very obviously the Fable look from previous games, but some of the scenery is beautiful. Watch out for high winds on snowy mountains; the snow-covered trees are mesmerizing.
5. Real estate is present again, and once you own enough property can make quite a bit of gold. You are paid once every five minutes of gameplay.
6. The new menu system. Instead of wading through tedious sub-screens in your inventory, you now have the Sanctuary, a place you go automatically (and instantaneously, no loading screens = awesome) when you push START. Your Sanctuary is divided into different rooms, a la Armory, Clothing, Trophy room, a LIVE room for Co-Op play, and the World Map in the main room. This allows you to quickly change your weapon or spell gauntlets, change or dye your clothes, and fast travel to different locations.
7. The maps are much bigger, and so is the explorable world. Finally we get a little more actual exploration. Many times I found myself thinking "Wow, this is all contained in one map?" If you're familiar with the previous two iterations of this game you'll be kind of blown away. Some of the map areas are huge. And in general you can actually leave paths altogether now and do some exploring, since there is now a lot of room to move around in.
8. Living weapons. The game tracks every aspect of your behavior, and modifies your weapons accordingly. Are you generous? You weapon's handle will mutate. Amass a lot of gold? Your weapon will glow with a golden aura. I thought it was pretty cool.
>What Fable 3 Did Wrong<
1. Most obviously, the magic system has been greatly simplified. Instead of purchasing more powerful iterations of spells you unlock with experience points, you now simply have Spell Gauntlets, or, magical gloves you wear to cast certain spells. What this means is, if you have unlocked say, Fireball (your first spell), Ice Storm, Force Push, Blades, etcetera, you can only equip one set of gauntlets at a time (until you unlock the Spell Weaving ability, which allows you to combine gauntlets to use a two-spell combo). It's frustrating because especially the original Fable had awesome spells that you could level up with experience points you gained. I really felt stifled and turned off by how limited your magical abilities were (even with Spell Weaving, and there are some cool spells).
2. Combat is a bit of a button-masher. Which is nothing new to this franchise, but it's still very repetitive. It's still interesting though. And there are now finishing moves, but I haven't found that these are anything more than random occurrences. X to use your melee weapon, Y to use your ranged weapon, B to use spell gauntlets. Holding each will result in a charged attack, but there is very little variation, and since holding a button to charge an attack will leave you wide open for attack, you probably won't use either ranged or melee charge attacks often. Magical charged attacks are more worth it since you can knock enemies down or back with an area-effect spell.
3. The glowing trail can be stupid, and the map is fairly useless. The world map, in my opinion, is much more useful for fast-travel or purchasing real estate more quickly, and much less useful as a tool to find a specific location. You cannot set your own waypoints either. Sometimes the glowing trail will disappear and you will have to wait fifteen or twenty seconds for it to reappear, and sometimes it will give you conflicting directions. For instance, I did a quest earlier tonight where I had to deliver a package to someone in Bowerstone Industrial. To get there I had to go through Bowerstone Market. So the glowing trail led me into Bowerstone Industrial, but once I got there the trail told me I should be going backwards back into Bowerstone Marketplace. The trail works most of the time, but when it doesn't it can be annoying.
4. To go along with bigger maps, there are frequent shading and view-distance issues. For instance, you'll be running through a town and see no one ahead of you, and then ten feet in front of you three npc's will suddenly appear out of nowhere. Floor and scenic models also take some time to load. The game definitely could use more polish. However, I will say the game has not crashed on me, so that is a positive.
5. Weapon augmentation is absent, and so are bows and crossbows, as well as any other melee weapon types except swords and hammers. Fine with me on the latter, but lack of augments kinda sucks. With legendary weapons, it is possible to unlock specific effects such as lightning and the like, but you can no longer choose what type of effect they have.
6. The expression wheel is gone. The expressions are always kind of silly anyways, I didn't miss it, but I've heard people complain about it. You can still do expressions, but only one TYPE of expression, such as EITHER a friendly expression OR an evil one.
7. Experience orbs are gone, instead you earn guild seals. An odd choice to me, since they are essentially the exact same thing, only with a different name.
8. Guild seal experience is arbitrary. I just finished a mission where I had to kill about 15 balverines, and I gained one and a half guild seals. That took me about a half hour. But if I walk through Bowerstone and give the needy gold, I can earn about five guild seals in about five minutes. What is this I don't even
9. Skills can only be upgraded as you progress in the story. You track your progress towards revolution on a symbolic map that shows how close you are to your goal. You are separated by approximately ten gates that are unlocked after you have completed certain parts of the story. This means that regardless of how many guild seals you have, you must wait until the gate is unlocked before you can level a skill up. I much preferred the original Fable's skill and experience system.
10. Your dog is slightly annoying. Useful for knowing where to have you dig, but most of the time he'll bark to show he's found something and then retrace his tracks at least once before finally slowing down and starting to paw the ground.
11. you must now maintain your real estate, but only if it's a house you're renting out. Shops and stalls you buy will not wear down. This really isn't that big a deal until you own a lot of property. I probably own pretty much everything you can own, which is over a hundreds houses (roughly), and so I have to INDIVIDUALLY choose each house, scroll down twice to the repair option, and then click A twice to say yes I am sure I want to repair this. >>>This is probably my biggest annoyance of all, and the dumbest. It now takes me about a half hour of gameplay just to go through all of my properties and fix them back up to 100% condition. If they reach 0% they are considered broken and will bring you no income. To go along with this, it is also quite costly to maintain them all collectively. Some just require a few hundred gold, but a few of the more expensive properties take like 45,000 gold or so to fix back up. Granted, by the time you own them you're probably raking in the money, but the point is when I go back and fix all the properties up, it costs me about 250,000 gold.<<< And one last thing about this, and that is...you don't have to fix things up but maybe once every 4 or so gameplay hours, but that you have to do it at all is dumb. I would rather they deducted the cost of maintenance out of the profits you're making and remove the repair thing altogether.
12.You can now only carry one type of healing device. Either health potions OR carrots OR meat OR beer, etc. So if you have 10 health potions and you buy one carrot, that carrot replaces all of your potions. I didn't quite understand why this was. It makes for simpler healing, but I didn't see the need to make it this way. My first time through I didn't know this, ran out of health potions thinking I had this great store of food to fall back on, and was surprised and irritated to see what you can only do one at a time.
13. Lastly, the game is far too easy. I played through it on my first try and only died (got knocked out) once. I would have liked it at least 50% more challenging. I felt nearly invincible practically from the start.
>Conclusion<
You will notice the list of things I think the game did wrong is about twice as long as what I think it did right. But I think what the game did wrong were much smaller issues, and much more heavily outweighed by the good things. In a game like this, it should be immersive first and foremost. And in that regard the game gets an A+. Everything else comes second. In this iteration of the Fable franchise, the strong story, voice acting, and characters really hold it all together. And yes, obviously there is a lot of room for improvement, but if you're on the fence about this game, take a chance, because it's rare these days to find a game that actually puts story first. Maybe in that regard my review is biased, but so many games (and especially sequels) are churned out these days with incredibly shallow plot and characterization that this was like a breath of fresh air.
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Box came with the one of the corner a little chipped, but considering the age of this game I expected MUCH more. Good news though, the disk was in perfect condition so don't worry about getting a bad disk at all! All manuals and even an xbox live trial are inside and in pristine condition. So I definitely recommend buying here rather than a used one, because you're getting a product that looks new.Amazing game! It's holds up today with it's humor and engaging role playing. But if you're reading this review you probably already know you want the game. Also X Box One backwards compatible so in case you didn't know, yes you can totally plop it into an X Box One and it'll install. Totally recommend!
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 7, 2010
Platform For Display: Xbox 360Edition: StandardVerified Purchase
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 26, 2011
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