Game:

Fable games have always been defined by the promises they fail to keep and Fable III is no different. For a good long stretch of the game the predominant feeling is likely to be one of deja-vu. Graphically all-but identical and stylistically very close to Fable II, the main difference that immediately stands out is how much seems to have been taken away from the player.

The process of streamlining began in the previous game, with the removal of the HUD, and has been extended to include the removal of all forms of overt levelling and all but the simplest of directly controlled mechanical choices. The process of interacting with the game world seems to have become rather weightless and simplistic, a feeling not dispelled by the game’s flatly schematic main story, which sees the player once again travelling to request help from a series of powerful allies who then dispatch him on a couple of basic fetch quests in order to test his heroic worth.

Lionhead’s stated ambition to remove all menus and statistics can bear a great deal of the responsibility for this lack of dynamism. Direct management of levelling up is now gone, replaced with the Road to Rule. This other-dimensional area contains chest which you unlock with guild seals earned through combat and quest completion, inside each of which are a set of skills. Walk up to the chest marked ‘melee level 2’ and you will level up all of your melee weapons. Simple and easy to understand it may be, but it is also disempowering and removes any real sense of worth that might have been attached to the new skills had they been directly tied to some tangible action or achievement.

This sense of harmful streamlining carries over to the interesting yet also deeply annoying decision to do away with the previous game’s clear and simple menu system and replace it with a physical location in the form of The Sanctuary. An interesting enough idea in principal, and one that gives your items and clothing a certain amiable physicality, it soon becomes deeply tiresome to have to physically walk up to something and manipulate it every time you want to change your outfit or weapon or to fast-travel to a location. In the end it amounts to a menu system in all but name, but one that has to be physically navigated at minor but persistent inconvenience to the player and which serves to make opaque the achievements and progressions that have been made so far.

Though now more limited in scope, there is a greater level of physicality in the relationship actions. Many now involve hugging or dancing or swinging people around by their hands, which is always amusing to try out on passing policemen, who invariable titter girlishly and call you a dreamboat.

Also sadly de-emphasised are the social and property features of the game. Social interaction now boils down to simply holding one of three buttons to perform and arbitrary facial expression and then repeating the process until the character likes/hates you. Facial expressions can no longer be equipped or in any way selected and interactions are limited to one individual at a time. The much-vaunted ‘touch system’ amounts to little more than being able to hold a character’s hand and physically drag them somewhere, a system that soon wears out its welcome due to poor collision detection and an irritating tendency to slow the player down to strolling-speed. There are only so many times you can be forced to reload a save because a companion has got stuck behind a door before you decide that the strong man really is mightiest alone.

Property management is one area where improvements have been made, mainly in the ability to buy properties and manage their rates and states of repair from the map screen and a good couple of hours can be happily whiled away attempting to gentrify a slum area through a program of building repair and the selection of tasteful dressing tables.

Ultimately these flaws come from whittling too much away from the mechanics of Fable II, which in many other respects survives here intact. It’s from the previous game that Fable III also inherits most of its great strengths, chief among which is the world of Albion, which remains a feature-packed and characterful playground unlike any other in gaming. A sort of Legend of Zelda as imagined by Monty Python, this deeply English fantasy world is still a place in which players can get lost for hours on end, supplementing the slim pickings of the main story with a life and career entirely of their own making. Despite being decoupled from overt character progression, distractions like becoming a wandering minstrel, rounding up crooks for the local guards or managing a property portfolio are just as whimsically entertaining as ever and will likely provide the majority of memorable experiences for most players.

Rather than instructing people to follow you, you now grab them by the hand and drag them where you want them to go. Sadly, this is pretty much FABLE III in microcosm.

The game’s story threatens to become more interesting in the final act, when you become king of Albion and must set about governing the land with either a velvet glove or a fist of iron, or possibly even a fist of iron inside a velvet glove. While some of the dilemmas presented here are fairly compelling, they are ultimately undermined by their lack of nuance. No decision can ever have side-effects, existing only in either black or white.

(Editors Note:Those that want to avoid spoilers may wish to skip the following paragraph)

Each piece of gold in the treasury represents one citizen who will survive the final invasion. Keep your promises to your allies at the expense of the treasury, and you will earn short term popularity at the expense of later physical devastation. What of the possibility that having more allies might help to repel the invaders? That building a scientific academy might result in the invention of new weapons? That better nourished, less over-worked people might fight harder? None of these are a consideration. The choice comes down to either cake or death. You can let the people hate you, or you can make them happy and they will all get killed.

While the physical changes your decisions effect on the world of Albion are more compellingly realised than ever before (draining Bowerstone Lake to build a mine, for instance), the whole thing is spoiled by a perfunctory climax completely free of jeopardy or any sense of permanent consequences delivered in the form of exactly the same kind of rote fight scenes that were done better earlier in the game before ending with – what else? – vague promises of bigger things to come.

The new magic system sees you equipping magical gauntlets, which can be mixed to create different combinations of spells such as fiery tornados or icy blizzards of electricity. It’s an interesting change which sadly sacrifices the flexibility and variety of the magic available in Fable II.

Review Round-Up

GRAPHICS – 3/5 - Perfectly functional but not what anyone would describe as a beautiful game. Some persistent issues with framerate drops and texture pop-in, as well as NPCs who are completely invisible until you get within a few metres of them. The fairytale art style is as pleasant as ever, especially now it has been applied to the seedy glamour of an early industrial revolution.

SOUND – 4/5 - Fable’s usual Danny Elfman-esque soundtrack of roaming choral tunes makes a welcome return and the voice-acting is packed with good-quality performances from a variety of name actors including Simon Pegg, Bernard Hill, Naomi Harris, John Cleese and Sir Ben Kingsley. Hill carries the lion’s share of the dialogue, putting in a very amiable performance as a slightly daft and paternal old sword-fighter who accompanies the player throughout the game. Special mention must go to Sir Ben, who delivers an eccentric turn as a half-mad, explosives-loving, old gypsy king in a manner which suggests an extended piss-take of Anthony Hopkins.

GAMEPLAY – 3/5 - The basic underpinnings and accessible gameplay with a small twist of skill as laid down in Fable II remain here essentially unchanged, but a commendable desire to streamline seems to have gone so far as to rip out a chunk of the mechanics that kept players tethered to the game. The persistent feeling is of uncertainty and of rewards too easily won, with new abilities simply bought outright rather than being the result of real effort directed with a purpose. Similarly, with the exception of one brilliantly ghoulish choice right at the beginning, dilemmas presented to the player are rarely carried through to the limits of their implied consequences, with good and bad decisions rarely delivering particularly different rewards or penalties as the game retreats at speed away from anything which might test the player’s patience or courage in anything but the most superficial way. The time spent on Albion’s throne at first seems to offer something very different, but unfortunately backslides into simple choices between GOOD and EVIL before ending the world not with a bang, but with a whimper.

LONGEVITY – 4/5 – The real worth of Fable III, as with the previous two games, will come in the weeks and months of play that follow the initial completion. Replayed with knowledge of how the game works and what is to come, Fable III yields up a flexible and engaging experiences that eclipses the rather thin and disappointing first playthrough. Albion is a wide and deep game world that yields up new pleasures and surprises long after the story is finished, and it is here, in the business of messing around and of building up the elements of a virtual life that the game truly begins to breath and come alive.

OVERALL:  3 Royal Chickens out of 5

Once again Peter Molyneaux and Lionhead studios have promised us the world and delivered Sweden. Fable III does very little to expand on the formula established in Fable II and many of the alterations it does make are actively harmful to player engagement and empowerment. However, it has also kept most of what was lovable and charming and genuinely joyful about Fable II and married it with the most expansive and well-drawn game world so far. The new Ruler mechanics are hesitantly implemented and ultimately disappointing compared to what might have been, but they provide enough scope for replay and experimentation to justify their presence for now. Ultimately, as with every game Molyneaux has ever made, Fable III is a truly brilliant sequel waiting to happen.

- Elliot Mears

Last week EA announced that they were cutting 1500 jobs in an effort to become more financially viable and it seems that Pandemic is just one of the casualties. Pandemic’s star has been shining less brightly in recent years, with the rumour that Pandemic were forced to cancel a game based on The Dark Knight at great cost to EA last year, and their game Mercenaries 2 underperforming critically and at retail.

We here at Newbreview wish everyone affected by this story the best of luck in the future. Their final game, The Sabotuer, will be in stores on the 4th of December.