It has been many years since the events of Fable II and Albion has entered an era of industry and commerce. Governed by a tyranical ruler, the skyline of Bowerstone has become picked and blotted with the smoke stacks of factories, her grubby-faced children forced to toil away in workhouses or beg on the streets.

Fable III casts you in the role of the prince regent, brother to Logan, the King. It isn’t long before your evil older brothers harsh treatment of the populace becomes too much to bear. You speak out against him and are forced to leave the palace in search of those who might help you depose and de-throne the tyrant-king.

Story and Characters

In Fable 3 you will travel the lands of Albion, gathering the support of various rulers, generals and revolutionaries to join you as you attempt lead a coup to take the throne from your brother. This story structure is very similar to Fable II, wherein your hero travels around Albion in the search for heroes to help you in a big final battle against an ultimate evil. It’s also not a million miles away from Mass Effect 2, which sees you gathering allies for a battle against some evil aliens or Dragon Age: Origins, which has you running all over the land, gathering support from its rulers against the Darkspawn. Even though it’s a popular RPG story template, I don’t really mind playing it but I was initially disappointed that Lionhead couldn’t come up with something a bit more original.

The story is nevertheless compelling and the characters you will meet along the way are funny and engaging. The storyline is much more linear than the other two games but this didn’t bother me too much since I really enjoyed how it was told and the beautiful backdrops it was set against. The all-star cast performed well and only added to the experience.

The shining jewel in the game without a doubt was John Cleese as Jasper the butler, who is with you throughout. Jasper is used primarily to introduce you to new features as they are unveiled in the game, this is a brilliant idea and works much better than a tutorial or on-screen prompts would ever do. One of Jaspers other functions, however, is to try and sell you DLC, which he will do regularly when there’s nothing else for him to say. I found this a tad annoying to be honest, but it’s still one of the best ways I’ve seen so far of in-game upselling. I wish games wouldn’t try to sell stuff to you for real money while you’re playing them, but I don’t think that particular niggle is going to disappear any time soon.

Character Progression

There have been some changes to the character progression in Fable III. This game does away with the skill screen from the previous games and instead puts you on a “road to rule” – a path that contains skills in chests that can be unlocked once you have earned enough “guild seals” from combat and questing.

In Fable II, skill points are awarded based on how an enemy is killed. For example, you kill an enemy with your gun, you get points to spend on your ranged weapons – developing your skill in that area. Not so in Fable III. Guild seals are awarded, no matter what method you use to dispatch your foes. Combos and combat bonuses for perfect fights have also been removed. This frankly baffling decision removes the incentive to mix up your attacks or focus your skills in a single school of combat. There’s no real reward for being a balanced fighter or developing your skills in magic to become an unholy sorcerer.

Your spells and melee attacks remain pretty much the same throughout the entire game. You can increase the power of your ranged, melee and magic attacks but when you do so, you upgrade the entire school. So you cant focus on being a powerful user of fire magic or a skilled pistol marksman. I felt this took a huge degree of personalization away from the character progression.

Combat

The ability to aim with ranged weapons has been removed too. In Fable II, it was possible to shoot a gun out of someones hand or blow their head off with a carefully aimed shot to the face. Not anymore. Ranged combat is now simply a matter of tapping the Y button. Very boring.

Your weapons will slowly change as you progress to reflect your personality. This doesn’t make up for the fact that you’re faced with little choice of weapons – There’s Sword or Hammer\Pistol or Rifle and that’s pretty much it. You can get a couple of variations of these from shops or quests but the selection of weapons with their varying levels of speed and performance from the last game are not present here. Neither is socketing, so you won’t be able to imbue your sword with fire and lightning any more. Towards the end of the game, my rifle did take on a firey aura but this was purely cosmetic and had no elemental effect on my shots.

Spell casting remains the same as in Fable II. You cast spells by charging them up and each spell has an area of effect or a direct damage version. The total number of spells has been reduced to five. The final spell, Blades, isn’t unlockable until the last portion of the game, which is a real shame and you no longer level up and improve individual spells with experience, they all level up at the same time when you purchase the upgrade on the “Road to Rule”. You can only take two of the five spells into the field with you and even then, they combine to make a single spell, which is basically both spells being cast at the same time.

Good and Evil

Character morphing is a feature that was present in the first two episodes of the series and a theme that runs throughout most of the games that Lionhead creates. There is something really cool about playing the game as a total douche-bag and slowly but surely, noticing little hints of evil creeping into your characters features. This doesn’t really happen as much in Fable III – Aside from you turning red instead of blue when you start casting spells. The main storyline is so linear that you rarely get the chance to make a good vs evil decision, leaving you to fart at residents of Albion or maybe killing a few villagers. The good and evil decision making is all condensed into the “King” stage of the game in which you rule Albion, but this section is over in a couple of hours of play, making it pretty much irrelevant.

Becoming A King

This is the final section of the game. I’ll try not to spoil too much, but if you don’t want to ruin anything and keep this section a surprise, you’re probably best skipping to the end of the review.

Becoming a King is what the storyline is driving towards. I played the game not really minding that they had stripped down the combat and casting system, because I assumed they were saving space on the disc or whatever for a feature-rich new game mode that would allow me to rule over Albion as King. The section of the game in which you become the king is pretty lacklustre to be honest, being no more than an on-rails quest line in which you are faced with a number of good or evil decisions that ultimately change key parts of the game world. This section is over quite quickly and only lasts for 1 year of game time for reasons I won’t go into. 1 year of gametime is depleted pretty quickly, in fact, the last hundred or so days just disappeared at the end, catapulting me into the final boss battle and the end of the game.

There’s no extra features on display here and if you’re hoping for some control over where buildings are built, the countrys economy or building an army outside of a few binary choices that come up in dialogue – be prepared for disappointment. I felt like this was Lionheads chance to really change the genre and the series, maybe mx-in some elements of the Black and White games and give the player real control over the world as they promised they would. I at least expected the game to run-on for longer than it did. The final boss battle is pathetic. So pathetic in-fact, that I didn’t even realise it was the final encounter until the end-game sequence started rolling.

In Summary

Fable III baffled me. Why? Well, they stripped out so much from the game, numerous features that I didn’t even mention in this review, but still I kept playing it. The story was very engaging and well told, its characters each unique and colourful in their own way, existing in a beautifully crafted world to a standard that other games don’t even come close to. However, it felt like it was no longer an RPG but just a story that you play through. Lionhead have distilled their game to the point that all you really have to do is follow the twinkling golden trail and mash a single button to complete it. After I reached the end of Fable III, all I really wanted to do was play Fable II to recapture all the awesome stuff they have removed.

In terms of gameplay, I think I get what they are trying to do. They are trying to make a beautiful game that is simple to play with all of what they consider to be bad about RPG games removed. They succeeded in doing this with Fable II. Fable III takes this ethos too far and leaves a good story, but unfortunately, a story you’ll probably only want playthrough once.