Lionhead Studios’ Fable has been one of the most anticipated games for the Xbox, and the delays on its release have made everyone’s expectations higher, hoping for something that would blow us all away.
From the same designer who brought us Black & White, Fable is a game based on making good or evil choices that will affect the life of the main character.
These choices will influence everything from appearance to reputation and available interactions (emotes).
You begin as a young boy, and your first task is to do a few good deeds to earn some gold in order to buy your sister a birthday present. Well, you can do the good deeds or you can be a little devil and break stuff or bully people around. Every task will offer you a moral choice, which is up to you to do.
An unfortunate turn of events shows your town invaded by bandits. Houses are set of fire, people are killed and a strange man appears and saves you, taking you to the Hero’s Guild.
At the Guild, you will learn how to use a sword, a bow and your Will to cast spells, and it’s here that you will go through your childhood and adolescence training to become a great adventurer.
The leveling system takes a bit getting used to, since you trade in your experience points in all the different attributes to ‘buy’ the abilities you want to increase. You gain experience in the different categories by using skills that require them: use your sword and you’ll get Strength experience; cast a spell, and you’ll get Will experience (make sure you get Slow Time), use the bow and you’ll get Skill experience. General experience points are used to buy any of the attributes, and you obtain them by killing foes and collecting the orbs.
You will see and fight many different creatures: bees, evil pixies, werewolves (balverines), undead, bandits, golems, banshees and more.
In your travels, you will find many merchants where you can buy supplies and armor, and others who offer special services like hair styling and tattoos. These are the coolest things to customize your hero, since you can pick and choose the ones you like best. More will be available to you as you find their respective cards. So ponytail, bald, beard, moustache, face tattoo, shoulder tattoo or leg tattoo (or all of them) it’s up to you.
Everything adds attractiveness to your character, some add to the scariness, and others have alignment modifiers. The armor suits and pieces will also have an influence on the hero and some of them are necessary to open certain Demon Doors. You can even walk around in a dress if you want to.
Aside from adventuring and questing, you can spice up your life by getting married and even having sex (you can also choose to be heterosexual or homosexual), boasting before accepting a quest (extra reward and renown if you succeed), showing off trophies and playing mini-games at the taverns.
Eventually, you will be famous enough to earn a title, but you have to buy it. Sam thing for your nickname, but then you’ll be able to walk around and hear people cheer and call you “Supreme Being” or whatever else you choose to be.
The story progresses with narration and some very cool murals for important events, and you can find them all in the Guild’s caves later on.
There were a few faulty things (glitches, maybe?) that really caught my eye.
One was with the resurrection phial number, that no matter how many you pick up, you will only have 9 to use.
The other, was what I think to be either a bug or the result of poor attention to detail: the spells Heal Life and Drain Life had the opposite alignment of what they should have. Drain Life has a positive modifier and Heal Life has a negative modifier. Makes sense? Not to me. Generally, healing spells are good and drain spells are evil.
Another thing I didn’t like was the fact that your character ages (mine reached the age of 65 by the end of the game) but nobody else does. So in the end, there I was 65 years old and a ton of wrinkles on my face, but my sister looked like she was still in her 20’s.
Overall, you’ll have around 15 hours of gameplay by the time you see the ending credits, and that’s with pretty much all of the side quests done. Even if you decide to play it twice, one being all good and one being all evil, that’s still only an average of 30 hours. And you don’t even have to play it twice, because since the game has an open ending, you can go on and use your money to change your alignment: donate to either the good shrine or the bad shrine. I recommend renting before deciding to buy it.
Was it good? Yes. But it didn’t blow me away.