Fable II (2008 Video Game) User Reviews

Not what it should have been.

[james.p.taylor · 8/10 · 31 October 2008]

In Albion a young child is encouraged to buy a magical musical box by a mysterious stranger. This brings the child and sister to the attention of Lord Lucien, the ruler of the land, who wants to use the box to bring back his dead wife and daughter. Tragedy strikes and the child (your character) is left alone. Taken to a hidden camp you're brought up by the mysterious Theresa until one day she suggests it's time to go and hunt Lucien down.

'Fable 2' is the sequel to one of the best games on the original Xbox, a game I thoroughly loved. The makers have delayed the release a few times, promising that the game would be huge and a real living land. Here they fall short. The original was short, six to eight hours to fully explore the land. 'Fable 2' took me around twelve to fourteen hours, including time spent after the main quest finished to wrap a few things up. This isn't the game promised. Yes, the levels are bigger and more beautiful, but there isn't much aside from finding hidden treasures to do after the game is done. The missions are varied and well paced enough. Compared to 'Elder Scrolls: Oblivion' this game is small.

The voice acting is great. The script is well written and has a lot of different shades that can draw you in. Although your character never speaks, you have a soul that as a player you can believe in. Interactions with the world do have consequences, changing things forever. You can choose your path, for good or evil, and the decisions alter the character physically. There is no customisation, a feature found in all RPG's these days, so the lack here is awful. Your pet dog, which is supposed to be a creature you can project emotion onto, is only good for sniffing out hidden treasures. Even if you level up its fighting ability it turns out to be useless.

Some of the areas from the original are back, but changed. It's a thrill remembering how things were and comparing them to what there is there now. Again you can get married, but this time you can have children and have to raise the family as well as saving the world.

The achievements are a puzzle. As a Microsoft game the awards are huge for merely progressing in the game. If you play online with a friend they can also benefit from your hard work and get the same achievement for just being there and watching. It is fun looking in on someone's world to see how their choice has shaped the land. You also cannot die. Although your life can get knocked down to nothing all that happens is you spring back up with the loss of some experience. It means there's no sense of achievement in defeating a boss with clever tactics. You can simply charge in and just bash away until you win through. This is obviously aimed at casual gamers who don't want to be constantly having to retry parts of the game they can't get around.

A good game, but flawed, this is the game that the original 'Fable' should have been and it doesn't address the problems I had with the original. Could have been so much better than it is and the main quest could have been much longer.

Good game but with flaws

[manicxrated · 8/10 · 5 November 2008]

Fable 2, like most Lionhead games is both wonderful and flawed, and when I say flawed I mean, pretty damn flawed. This is why I will start with the bad stuff:

Firstly this game has so many bugs and glitches it would be impossible to list them all. Walking around Albion I was stunned to find whole buildings disappear before my very eyes, at one point my daughter (yes you can have a family) became catatonic and would not respond to anything my character said or did. I tried reloading; shutting down the console etc, but my precious daughter remained unresponsive. In the end I had to get the game to take her into social services just to get her off the street.

Other things that are a little irritating are for example the loading times. They aren't very long but they are so frequent that it starts to damage your immersion with the game, the fact that Fable 2 has quite linear mapping as well makes me question why there is so much loading when the world isn't massively open? Also your world map is in your inventory and not brilliantly user friendly. I feel like it would have been much better to have a mini-map in the top right hand corner of the screen that you could of set locations on. This would have also solved another irritating problem: "The glowing trail…" okay granted you can turn this off in the game but it is annoying having a bright light guide you round your quests every step of the way.

As other people have mentioned the camera is also pretty irritating, you can hardly get a good look at your character as it is positioned too high up which also stops you feeling quite so involved with the game and also using your "Expressions" can be annoying and clumsy, for example you should have been able to save certain expressions to the directional pad instead of having to bring up separate menus and scroll through them, it just seems a bit messy.

Basically all my gripes and nit picks are over things I just felt they did better in Elder-Scrolls Oblivion but this game also has a lot of thing that Oblivion doesn't.

There are a hundred reasons to buy and love this game, first and foremost is the pure undiluted charm this game radiates! The accents, the dialogue, the humour and the quintessential British-ness in Fable 2 are outstanding, so many times I caught myself chuckling away at some casually thrown one liner.

Fable 2 itself looks great and brings forward much of the same style from the first Fable, the environments are beautiful whether they are lush green forests or creepy swamps and even though the actual story is quite short there is plenty to explore if you are a completionist and want to find every piece of treasure or every gargoyle. The voice acting is also fantastic and I hardly heard any repeated dialogue what so ever.

Having a family is a definite plus, you can be a man or women and find a number of straight, gay or bisexual partners. You can sleep with prostitutes, get drunk or just plain massacre a village if you feel like it and everything has consequences on your appearance and how people treat you, for example drinking all the time will make you both fat and corrupt.

The cut-scenes in Fable 2 are, despite being short, breathtaking; the animation is brilliant and when you finally get a long awaited cut scene it really feels like a reward for progressing.

Another thing I loved about this game was the dog. Yes I know it doesn't really do that much apart from sniff out treasure and chew the odd bad guys leg but it has so much character, especially when reacting to you or your expressions. It even changes appearance based on how good or evil you are. I guess that is what I like most about this game is its character.

Overall I did enjoy this game even if I felt it was an unfinished masterpiece. I would say to the hardcore RPG fans that expect to fully customise their character and have over fifty hours of game play: This may disappoint. But I definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoyed the first Fable or anyone who wants a fun pick up and play adventure with bags of soul.

Not all that great

[veronikak4 · 7/10 · 26 October 2008]

For such a highly anticipated game i'm not sure what all the fuss is about . The whole game overall is not bad but it defiantly feels like an unfinished project.For instance i hate the fact that you can't zoom on the map or you own character. I mean the idea of having all these features to make your character unique like make up, clothes, hair styles is awesome but it feels like a complete tease when you can't even take a closer look on your own creation. The way the menu is set up i thought was also under worked....through out the game you collect hundreds of items and it takes a while to find exactly what you looking for from your inventory because it's organized in a very disorganized matter.

Great role-playing game for the casual player as well as genre fans

[bob the moo · 14 February 2010]

Many years ago in the period covered by the NES through to the N64, I loved the Zelda franchise but after that console I pretty much put gaming to one side for the best part of a decade. A year or so ago now when I bought myself a Xbox360 so I could do COD4, a game I enjoyed so much that it was the only one I owned for about 18 months, until MW2 came out. One of the benefits of that game being so full of glitches that so many players exploit (3 months in at time of writing and still full of them) was that I started looking at other games of interest. At that time Fable 2 started being offered in download form of 5 chapters – the first of which was free. Of course you offer an Irish man something free then you can pretty much say goodbye to it so I tried it out.

Although running round as a child looking for warrants was not the most thrilling experience, the early moral choices were a nice touch and, once the story actually kicks in (with Lucien killing your sister and trying to do the same to you) it becomes engaging. The story is typical role-play stuff, you can do your best to rip through the actual story from start to finish or you can take your time, do side quests and many of the life-style things that exist within the game but as a story it is well written and broken down into chunks that unfold well as you play along. Aside from this there are side missions to bring you awards of gold, fame, weapons or items that can assist in getting by in this world. Of course if you are only about "finishing" the game then finding books to teach your dog new tricks will not be of too much interest but the gameplay is clever to build in such things as being important at certain stages, so, while not all of them are critical to progress, some of them are and they aren't allowed to be totally like two separate parts of the game.

To casual gamers (such as myself) and non-rpg players (such as myself) this does create a necessary evil that, at some point the game will not just progress as fast as you can swing a sword, you'll have to build up experience points and learn new skills or you will either not be able to complete some challenges or you will simply be outclassed by the enemy. This is par for the course and I was fine with it but I will be honest and say that it is hard to really explain to your girlfriend what the appeal of the game is when she has seen you make swords or chop wood for 30 solid minutes – particularly when chores around the flat remain undone! This stage of the game is a bit of a pain but, once you start getting some basic property under your belt then the money starts to take care of itself as long as you are not in a massive rush. Indeed it can come quicker at the expense of your morals, in a thing that I liked about the game – you can exploit all the NPC characters like crazy but you turn ugly and are hated as a result (something that will cause you other problems). Such conflicts are constant in the game and they add colour but the game can still play no matter what path you chose (there is no "wrong") and it allows you to change without too much work.

Once the game is "finished" there are still things to dabble around in (such as doing up houses, getting the various achievements etc) and these are quite fun although of course not as fun as the games. Likewise the missions and jobs continue while the DLC has some good stuff in it to help extend the game. The graphics are great, even if the camera control is perhaps not as automatically responsive as you would want, while the levelling of sound effects and music allows for the ipod to do the work while the subtitles help distinguish important dialogue from the endless chatter of villagers. Speaking of which, the comedy inherent in the material is of great value – whether it be the characters themselves or the wonderfully odd use of voice works (from a dour Brummie ghost to a wonderfully flamboyant Stephen Fry), it adds so much to the enjoyment and uniqueness of the game compared to some rather dry and overly serious games in the same genre Overall Fable 2 is a great game. It is perhaps a little linear for those that love to be lost and confused for hours (personally the breadcrumb trail was perfect for me) but it does have puzzles and things to work out. The story is well fleshed out with missions, quests and characters, some of which are avoidable and some of which are not – but not all can be done on the same path, meanwhile the use of humour, characters and some great voice work really help it. I tried it for free, bought each chapter and am now looking forward to Fable 3 a great deal – not bad for someone who doesn't really like the genre.

Let me spin you a fable too.

[misterrobes · 8/10 · 4 November 2008]

Fable 2 at long last, huh? And it's enjoyable. But, only 8/10. Pourquoi? A few reasons.

As mentioned my another reviewer, the load times are very annoying. When you hit the menu button, it takes a few seconds with some clunking and clicking from your disc making you think, 'It's not scratched, is it?' before activating. And there are other irritating freezes within the game, not dissimilar to 'Oblivion'.

But, my major quibble is that I, as an entrepreneur (within the game) and a married man (within the game), decided to bring my lovely wife to a new house and purchase it, the plan being to rent out our old one. No sooner had I bought the house, than I was treated to a beautiful display of computer art which concluded in telling me that I was now married. A scene that was somewhat familiar to me. For I was already married. What I am getting at is that the game married me to the same woman twice! And unlocked the 'Bigomist' achievement, a rating I felt was unwarranted. And then saved the stupid game so I couldn't undo this without starting the whole game again from scratch. How annoying.

Even more annoying, I couldn't bring the child my lovely wife and I had had from our old house. So, I've got the same family spread between two houses and can't rent out the old one because my baby is still there and the computer won't automatically bring the child into the new house.

So, buggy. But, the game is good other than that. I'll add to this if I find any more errors (or good points that no-one else has thought of).

Good but not as good as the 3rd one

[samtimoney-79758 · 8/10 · 27 May 2018]

I love fable, great ideas, great story's and a lot of thought has gone in. This is a great game, it's better than the first because it looks better, it's more creative and is less like a prequel Star Wars film with all the Jedi and there temple like the first fable game. I loved all the trolls and creatures you had to fight but the map was harder to read than the first one, and overall in places hard to understand the controls and probably to much to do as I couldn't be bothered to do all the little side missions and so on.

Flawed masterpiece

[chrisglazzard · 8/10 · 14 July 2020]

This is a great game but let down by there attempt at making it multiplayer, It suffers like MMO's do as can't give you a proper in-depth story as two online players have to view all the same scenes so you just stand around as somebody talks. Everything from the first game has been improved tho from controls to magic use but no mini map in hud is annoying & just have to pause to see it or just follow the golden trail to your quest

Also played it on Xbox game pass & it's an awful version they have on game pass that constantly crashes & truest ruins the experience

Lightweight

[petra_ste · 6/10 · 20 November 2008]

There are several things Fable 2 does right. On a technical level it's competent, even visually appealing with its bright colour palette. Gameplay is simple but smooth. There are also a few smart and sadly uncommon options, like a cooperative mode on the same console and the opportunty to keep playing sidequests even after finishing the main story.

On the negative side, Fable 2 feels small: the main quest is easy, the world of Albion cramped. Worse, the game is slick but lacks any level of depth. Not only masterpieces like Planescape: Torment, but even narratively simple RPGs like Icewind Dale are on higher level in terms of complexity. In Fable 2, characters are mostly nondescript puppets; interactions with them don't go beyond a juvenile "you give them presents and they love you, you kill NPCs and they hate you". Also, while the game does feature a morality system, it's quite simplistic. Apart for a single decision at the end, I can't recall any truly complex moral choice - unlike the many memorable moments in the Mass Effect and Witcher series.