Fable 3

Rating: T

Score: 7.5/10

A young boy/girl, their dog, and their dream. That's what true fables are made from. Fable 1 capitalized on that, and was quite successful. Fable 2 acheived great success along the same root. Is the third time the charm? This game is available for the Xbox 360 with plans to be ported to the PC at the time of writing.

The story is a bit deeper than "a kid and their dream". You are a teenage prince, and your brother is the king. Your brother is quite cold-hearted, so you break free and decide to lead a revolution to overthrow your own brother and take control of the country. To have a revolution, you need an army, so you spend time helping out the poor (the group your king attacks). You were born of a father known as a great hero, who happened to have kept his power sealed for his children. With this in mind, it seems quite weird that you spend your days running errands for the poor when you’re the prince of the kingdom.

You're given two types of weapons: melee and ranged. Each of these types of weapons branch off to two different types of weapons in their respected genre. Melees have swords and hammers while ranged have rifles and pistols. Swords are fast and effective, but not nearly as strong as hammers. Pistols are the swords of ranged weapons: fast and effective, but not nearly as strong as rifles. Rifles are also more accurate but in a game with auto-aiming it doesn't matter as much as you might think. Now, wait, Fable 2 had multiple different types of ranged weapons and melee weapons, what is this? Well, you still have the variety (kind of), but indirectly.

Your weapons will level as you do, but will only do so in oddly peculiar ways. Your weapon will get bonuses once you get one of the milestones set out by the weapon. For example, you might be a +20% attack bonus after defeating 400 enemies at night. It's an interesting way to level up a weapon, but the question arises as to why it exists; what is its real purpose? It's only a matter of clocking in several minutes to several hours to level up a weapon in one way, so it's not particularly challenging nor does it add much to the gameplay.

Gameplay, since we're on the topic, is a lot like you'd come to expect. Enemies appear, you beat them down with your weapons, you move on. Along with your melee and ranged, you can use magic spells. Some magic spells, the ice spell to be exact, are quite overpowering in crowd-control, which is what the combat comes down to. Just shoot it out, and the enemies sustain quick, easy damage and can't do too much of anything against you.

Throughout the game, you'll do a lot of things. From chase chickens while in a chicken costume yourself, make pies, defending a village from skeletons, calling in a friend in the game and entertaining villages all hours of the day. It's a game filled with quite a bit of variety.

Although it's filled with all this variety, the customization of weapons is quite poor. It seems more like a step down from Fable 2. Since there is no huge leap gameplay-wise, Fable 3 comes off as being very inferior, although it is a very fun game. This fable is starting to become an over-heard folk-tale.