Fable III

Having played Fable back on the XBox and Fable II on the XBox 360, I enjoyed both, despite them being flawed games that never delivered what was promised by the developers. So when Fable 3 arrived I was hoping for more of the same. And it delivers on that.

So it's more running around, doing quests, killing monsters and listening to people talk with all sorts of English accents. And choosing between good and evil, as the series has had from the start.

So what's good about this one? Well, the voice acting cast is amazing. Freaking amazing. John Cleese as the butler, Simon Pegg as a fellow rebel, Michael Fassbender as the evil King Logan, Johnathan Ross and of course the always wonderful Stephen Fry as the immortal Reaver. All of them doing amazing jobs and giving it 110%.

What else? The game is fundamentally about overthrowing King Logan and ruling Albion in his place. And one interesting thing about it is that even after you've gone through gaining the support for the rebellion, the game's not over yet. A lot of games - or movies for that matter - would wrap up with the victorious crowning of the new King. Fable III has you deal with the aftermath. You must live up to the promises you made to get rebels on your side, and deal with decisions concerning the economy, rebuilding after the fighting and even matters such as regulation on alcohol purchasing. After one such decision, I ended up having to deal with the majority of my people wandering drunkenly around the streets and puking. The game does a reasonably good job of conveying the sense of responsibility of ruling the kingdom without being too boring or annoying.

And what's bad about it? Well, it's riddled with bugs. While I haven't run into anything too annoying or game-ruining, plenty of people are reporting online that they've lost save games or had to start all over again to get past a bug. The developer even set up a page for players to report bugs to their testing department. I can't say that I particularly enjoy the feeling that I paid full price for a game to be one of it's testers but then again I didn't hit a game breaking bug so it doesn't bother me that much.

The other thing that bothers me about it is that for the latest game in a series that made such a big deal of choosing between good and evil, there's not really much point in choosing evil in this one. The first part of the game has you trying to win support for your rebellion and you do so by saving people, fighting monsters and making promises to help. It's hard to enjoy playing a bad guy when you get sent off to clear out monsters and save people and cutscenes where you sincerely promise to do the right thing when you're king. Of course, your character could be lying but it doesn't feel that way. There is the occasional evil quest but only two or three in the entire game. It just feels like the evil path wasn't as thought through or fleshed out as it was in the last game.

In the end, it's an enjoyable game but not a great game. But as it apparently sold somewhere around half a million copies in it's first day on sale I think there's little doubt we'll see a Fable IV.