The Joy of Fulfilled Promises, a Fable 2 Review

Once you enter another person’s game, you take the role of a henchman. Sadly, you won’t be able to retain your moral standing, equipment or appearance, though you will keep your experience and gold—but your skills will be scaled to match the host in order to keep combat balanced. You end up with a generic-looking character that still plays, for the most part, like your hero. The major downside to this henchman style co-op is that the two heroes share the same camera and are therefore forced to stay close to one another. The obvious issue is that you can’t run about killing random people in your friend’s game, and a less obvious (but far worse) issue is that your movement in combat is restricted to a set distance away from your partner. In large-scale fights, this presents a problem, since you both have to coordinate your movement to an absurd degree.

Yeah, this game is pretty.

One final point: as a game reviewer, I feel it is my job to identify what kind of audience a game would attract. For this reason, I took Peter Molyneux’s request for reviewers to watch non-gamers play Fable 2 personally. I decided to take Molyneux up on his little challenge anyway to test my mettle as a reviewer and handed the controller off to my father, whose last foray into video games was a marathon session of Tempest back in his college days.

My hypothesis: I figured Fable 2 would be relatively easy to pick up and play once non-gamers got used to a controller in their hand, although the tutorials would be insufficient as they don’t walk the player through each button press. Ultimately, I figured this game would be easier to pick up than games like Halo or an Elder Scrolls title, but it wouldn’t be as seamless a transition as Mr. Molyneux suggested.

Well, this turned out mostly true, although I have to admit that my father did pick up basic navigation and character interactions far easier than I thought he would. Despite my efforts to sit on my hands, bite my tongue and let him figure it out, I did have to chime in a couple of times when the tutorial’s button icons flashed as they didn’t tell where on the controller a button was located (non-gamers need to know that stuff).

This isn't just concept art, she's actually in the game. *shudder*

It took him about a half-hour to complete the introductory childhood phase of the game (which is pretty standard) and he genuinely enjoyed it. His only major complaint was that he couldn’t tell when he was involved in a cinematic moment and should listen to NPCs versus when he needed to interact with them. Also, the gold path would occasionally move in a way that he couldn’t easily read, as he was unfamiliar with classic quest structure, which had him running into walls for long stretches of time.

So yes, Fable 2 is pretty accessible to the gaming illiterate; more so than I would have given it credit. That being said, some hardcore gamers (especially those who never played Fable) might have a hard time getting used to it since the controls are far simpler than most third-person games. Once you get them in your thumbs though, this game is downright fun.

What else can I say? It’s just plain fun.

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