Nukezilla Review: Fable III (360)

Peter Molyneux titles are almost always eagerly anticipated and overdue when they’re released. The resulting games  tend to get critics and fans riled up with emotional cries of disappointment or vehement and elaborate defenses. I’ve never belonged to either camp, but as someone who has been playing Bullfrog and now Lionhead games for two decades, I take the time with each title to sample and enjoy all of the care and craft contained within.

What would happen though if Peter Molyneux and company were nailed to a short term development cycle and apparently forced to release a sequel under ever increasing pressure from Microsoft Studios? The result, of course, would be Fable III.

Whether you’re new to Albion’s grass valleys, rolling hills and hobbe infested caves or a seasoned returning Hero, Fable III starts off in a familiar fantasy RPG manner. Your evil brother Logan, who happens to be King of Albion, orders your death and following a harrowing escape from the castle grounds you are forced to start from scratch with no skills, weapons or money to your name.

The twist here is rather than simply building your personal magical, physical and combat abilities as preparation for what you would expect to be a  bloody final confrontation with ol’ bro, your main objective is to rally support throughout the land; support for a revolution with you as the ruler to be. There is a leveling system which allows you to customize your skills down broad or specific paths, but all of this progression is based on the goodwill (or fear) of the people you generate with your actions.

Where the game promises great things in concept, it rarely delivers in execution. The idea of leading a revolution against a tyrannical government by making political alliances and spreading your fame or infamy through action is pretty compelling stuff. In reality though, nearly all of these actions come down to a binary choice.

It’s not a spoiler to reveal there is a point where you will become king and as the ruler of Albion you are under constant pressure to live up to the same promises that put you in power in the first place, but these promises always come at a literal high price. The treasury’s coffers are very limited, so unless you have amassed enormous personal wealth to feed into the budget, you will not be able to afford all of your commitments.

The metaphor is a wonderful and timely parallel for the financial and political troubles of our day, but the game’s economy allows for unlimited profits via the real estate system. After fifteen hours of play, I owned every available property in Albion. If I had continued to play every possible side quest (and thereby extending the in-game play time by several more hours) I would have amassed a personal fortune that would have allowed me to keep my promises, the love of the people and save every living person in the nation.

Once you see how easily the whole system falls apart it makes your “choices” feel all the more hollow. This isn’t the only major problem with the game, but it pretty much skewered my intellectual investment in the game world.

Some of the other innovations cause more problems than they solve. For example, there is no pause menu per se. When you pause the action the game takes you to the sanctuary, a room where there’s a miniature tabletop of the game world which can be used for fast travel, to view quest listings and manage real estate.

If you want to change your wardrobe, armaments, view statistics or purchase DLC all of these actions take place in a pseudo in-game hub. Changing clothes or weapons should only take a few seconds, but with this additional layer of interface it adds time and frustration to the most mundane and simple tasks.

People joked when Playstation Home was announced that some day you would have to launch games from within the Home interface or purchase DLC by visiting a digital store from within the shopping mall. Lionhead have taken that absurd concept and applied it throughout the whole game. You want to applaud them for making such a bold choice and it might have worked with significant modification and optimization, but this implementation is very poor indeed.

This same abstraction is used for leveling up your character’s skills. Dubbed the “Road to Rule” at key points in the plot you are directed to enter a portal where a winding pathway appears, partitioned into smaller sections by locked gates. Each section contains treasure chests which you can unlock by spending guild seals (the experience currency received from completing missions and interacting with citizens).

During their brain storming meetings these may have sounded like clever ideas, but in practice they feel like a series of over designed shallow components lacking in usability and taking time away from adventuring in the “real (game) world”. People complained that Fable II‘s menus were slow and cumbersome to navigate. I don’t recall anyone suggesting they be replaced by a symbolic pathway that you can only traverse in real time and where unlocking new abilities requires watching the same clunky animation over and over again.

Not surprisingly, Fable III excels in many core production elements like the highly detailed architecture, the witty triple-A voice cast (Bernard Hill, Ben Kingsley, John Cleese, Stephen Fry, Simon Pegg and the list goes on), gorgeous landscapes and solid character design.

However the whole is not supported by its parts. The music and sound effects are atrocious and grating, the combat frantic and single dimensional, but really some of these elements could be forgiven if the story, characters and pacing had made the journey worthwhile. In short, they do not.

Instead of a masterpiece of epic personalized storytelling the game feels like twenty hours of missed opportunities with an ending that comes off about as well as a wet fart. Nearly every mission comes down to fighting large groups of boring enemies or holding the hand of a helpless person, pausing now and then to fight waves of boring enemies. The unexpected twist that’s delivered more than half way through the game offers a change of scenery and foe, but the final confrontation with said menace is laughable and fails on every level to convey the emotional or dramatic impact the game promises.

Not everything is gloom and doom though. The Fable franchise is known for having an off beat sense of humor and Fable III is no exception. From time to time the game hits you with something genuinely hilarious like the foul mouthed garden gnomes you’re tasked with collecting. Or the mission titled simply, “The Game” where you take part in a medieval tabletop dungeon stomp narrated by three nerds, one of whom will (should?) remind you of your teenage self. The comic timing is spot on, but that’s what you get with quality writing, direction and the right voice talent. If only the same qualities could have permeated the rest of the production, this would have been a very different review.

There are so many other disappointments here, I could go on for days: a dodgy framerate, choppy animation, useless job mini-games, cumbersome real estate system, broken economy, black and white moral choices, limp plot twists, uninspired combat encounters, tedious weapon upgrades, glitched hand holding, fucked camera and a severely limited expression system. (*inhales*..*exhales*..PAUSE..)

The game is reduced to one of the most joy-free products I’ve played in years. Clearly they had a mind to streamline the experience by improving on their success with Fable II, but whether due to time, money or lack of a unified vision Fable III has ended up as a game where the developer just hasn’t thought it through.

I’ve never loved a Fable title, but number three feels like it could have been something really remarkable. What they released however has killed my enthusiasm for the franchise.

At this point I think it would be best if Lionhead put Albion on ice for at least a decade and revisit it when they have the time and effort to make a great game. With Lionhead apparently spreading their focus on products like Milo and Kate I wonder when we’ll see our next proper release from them; one that’s worked on by the studio’s best and brightest and given enough time to be worthy of their pedigree.