Fable III Standard Edition - Xbox 360

My feelings on Fable III mimic the chicken; it is a love/hate relationship. Some things are better in this installment. Some (many) things are worse. Overall, the game is playable, but could have been better. Graphics: Better than the previous installment. The people are still a little homely (seems to be the norm in games these days), but I like the wardrobes, animations, and other stuff. Only problem I have with the graphics is the framerate. It can get choppy. This can make jobs particularly difficult, as they rely on quick, precise timing at the higher chain levels. I am hoping they get this patched soon. Sound: You can tell the sound is good when you don't realize it is even there. My favorite part are the random voice overs. I was doing a blacksmithing job and overhearing children going on about a roleplaying game. The stats. That sort of stuff. Was highly amusing. The only thing I find a little disappointing is that some dialogue isn't varied enough (e.g. the um... pillow talk). Minor point though. Challenge: In combat, melee weapons continue to be a bit of a chore compared to guns or spells. Spells are easier now. Guns too. Overall, the combat isn't hard. Especially considering the AI is stupid. Monsters will stand there half the time and let you shoot them. Could have used more polish. The jobs are harder than the previous installment. It is basically "guitar hero" (or as they refer to it in game, Lute Hero). You have two--sometimes three--color coded blocks. You have to hit the correct button as a bar slides over the block. It is fun, and hard at higher levels. It IS color coded. If you are colorblind, this may be an issue for you. Length: I haven't beaten it yet, but have been playing it for several days now, so it's really what you make out of it. If you sprint to finish, you might get done fast. I've been goofing off and doing the roleplaying bit. I can easily see 100-200 hours for me. Fun: The game is addictive. But that may be because I'm a masochist. There are a LOT of things about the game, in comparison to the previous title, I do not like. The full list: 1) You have no health bar in combat. This is an RPG. The lack of feedback is disconcernting. 2) You have to hit [A] to interact with NPCs to pull up info (when you could previous [RT] them). When you do interact with an NPC you have fewer options. You start out with two interactions. It can expand to three, sometimes four. However, it feels boring. Also, whenever you get to the friend status you have to perform a fetch quest to become a friend (that are ALWAYS in a different zone requiring you to suffer through a loading screen). When you move up to lover status you have to perform another quest. It gets old fast. Overall, a huge step back. Would have preferred they just left the NPCs as they were and spent the time elsewhere. 3) The Road to Rule is an interesting concept, but they put too much stock in it. Why do I have to spend guild points to level up a trade skill? I had a level 5 blacksmith before I ever struck my first hammer to anvil. I find that offputting. 4) The menu system (read: Sanctuary) totally blows. Yes, it is a novel concept the first couple of times you use it. But after you want to switch your active quest, inspect a weapon, or see you status for the umpteenth time, it stops being fun. It becomes a chore. Why developers continue to try and "revolutionize" menu systems, when they were perfected years ago I'll never understand. All Fable needs is a lightweight menu system that is fast to load. That's it. This just adds more overhead the game doesn't need. 5) Houses need to be maintenanced. Realistic? Yes. Fun. No. Especially if you have a lot of them. 6) The dog is buggy, and the quest trail sometimes takes a long time to figure out where it is going, especially if you switch quests in field (read: Going to Sanctuary and wrestling with the screens). In all fairness there are a few things I think were a major step forward: 1) Your weapons. Legendary weapons now have three stats that have to be activated by completing specific conditions. For example, you may have to kill 300 enemies of a certain type (with that weapon), or to make 5 NPCs fall in love with you (with the weapon equipped). It adds an interesting twist to an otherwise tired trope. 2) My character (female) hasn't hulked out yet. Always nice. 3) Some of the rifle animations are awesome. If an enemy is behind you, and it is the closest, you will throw the rifle over your shoulder and fire behind you. Major cool points for this. Overall, the game is good but not great. I think Fable II continues to play better in a lot of ways. However, it is better than most RPG titles on the XBox, so it is by no means a dud either.

My wife and I are always looking for games BOTH of us like to play together. Fable III achieved that with the convenience of saving often so we can start/stop when we like. This is a huge plus for us because we have young children who don't plan their needs around our gaming time. The storyline is interesting and you get to "choose your own game" in that your choices alter the content you will experience. The travel mechanics include a nice feature to fast-travel to locations on the map where you've been before. You have to "poof" to your "Sanctuary" and walk to your map table the hit Y to bring up your quest log though, not too convenient. The repetitiveness of repeating the same expressions over and over to build relationships with in-game characters is a bit tiring. Parents recommended to heed the game rating (M), quite a bit of flirtatious innuendo and graphic combat. Overall, we still enjoy playing this game.

I have had Fable III for about 2 weeks, and I have "beat" it twice already. While some people are complaining about the length of the story, here's the deal.... The first time I beat it, I went through the story without doing side quests, buying real estate, ect. Doing that makes it very difficult to make certain choices toward the end of the game. The second time, I made sure to do the things I didn't do the first time. I did the side quests, I made pies to get enough gold to start buying real estate, I explored more of the world. This made the game much more enjoyable the second time around. I worked on the story as I did all of this, but only small chunks at a time. I wanted to buy up all the houses/businesses in Albion before continuing the story all the way through. It was more time consuming, but fun, and I was able to make the choices I truly wanted to make. So what am I saying? The people complaining the game is far too short probably didn't take the time to do those things. Yes, the game is a bit short, but, you can draw it out and make it more interesting. The developers want you to do the side quests, make money, start a family, and so on. Even after you complete the story, there are still a lot of quests to do and more world to discover. There are also keys to find and gnomes to destroy. Plus, we will have DLC's to look forward to. Another cool thing about the game are the characters. The NPC's are a bit "smarter" then they were before. Listen for the little side conversations the town people have, it's quite amusing. Also, your father figure, Sir Walter Beck, is a very likable character. They really did an excellent job in creating him. One of the things I don't like about the game is the fact you can use your spells and just destroy everything with little effort. You get the ability to use 2 gauntlets at the same time, so I was using a cyclone spell and fire spell, to create a fire tornado, basically. The ability to hold hands with people is pretty cool, but doesn't work most of the time. Meaning, you will still be "holding hands", but the other person will just be following you for the most part. Things like dyes now need to be purchased on the Road to Rule, and you have to spend Microsoft Points to get dye packs. I found that tacky. The biggest issue right now is the fact the game is so buggy. It lags, the quest trail will randomly disappear, mobs will bug out and interrupt quests, and my spouse is very hard to find most of the time, which sucks, because he always seems to have a gift for me and I can never find him! I really hope they release an update soon to address these issues. All in all, though, I would recommend this game. It's very entertaining, and can keep you busy for hours if you take the time to do things outside of the story.

The first review here is wrong. This game is not about making a family because a family will most likely be optional like the last game. This game is about the defeat of a tyrant and your character becoming the new king about midway through the story. Moral choices must be make by the new king (you) that will affect Albion and a new land called Aurora. Lionhead Studios has 2 videos talking about the game and from what they say and the footage they show i would say the game looks just as good if not better than Fable 2.

In the old Fable games, choosing good or bad often resulted in a choice of gameplay. Like, protect the barn or attack the barn, giving you two distinct missions to choose from, and two distinct versions of the aftermath. This one completely takes away the gameplay choice, you are going to protect the barn either way, but after you protect it, you can choose to let the owner remain the owner or take the farm from him. This is not an actual example, but it just shows that you no longer have that gameplay choice. The game itself has also been dumbed down significantly, taking away the majority of any customization you had as well as stream lining combat so that any 4 year old can play. Graphics: Pretty much the exact same as Fable 2. Decent for the 360, but they aim more towards cartoonish than realistic. Storyline: The storyline was decent. You are the son/daughter of your character from Fable 2, and your brother is king and is abusing his power in many ways. He has made promises all across the kingdom that he has broken in the name of saving the kingdom, the classic excuse from a tyrannical king. In the begining of the game, you are faced with probably the largest moral question of the game, where each choice has a negative impact. This forces you to examine your life, and flee the kingdom in hopes of starting a revolution. The first half of the game is all about this. You must go from village to village trying to recruit soldiers, and in the process prove that the results of your revolution will be nothing like the rein of your brothers. The second half of the game is when you become king, and must make decisions larger than any seen in the Fable universe. As said previously, the decisions are usually "play mission A, choose ending A or B" as opposed to the "choose mission A see ending A, or choose mission B see ending B" as it has been in the past. The decisions you have to make are on a much higher level than you have seen in the past, because you are now making decisions for the entire country of Albion. Generally the idea is, do you become a good king and make the people like you, but run out of money in the treasury thus facing certain doom, or do you make the hard choices, and become a bad king and save everyones life in the end. Some of the decisions are just ridiculious though. For example, you are faced with an issue one day as king. The old king has placed a limit on the number of alcoholic drinks that a pesant may buy. You can be a good king, and take away the limit, be neutral and keep the limit, or be evil and ban alcohol. I am shooting for a good king, so I decide to take away the limit to make my people happy. They do end up being happier, but now 90% of the population in my kindgdom is throwing up on the streets. This is not a joke, it is literally at least 90%, it completely takes away from the experience of walking through a town when everyone except the children is throwing up everywhere. All of your decisions are like this, they are either one extreme or the other, often way over the top as well. Gameplay: Your basic hack n slash combat here. They make combat easier by assigning the melee weapon to the X button, gun to the Y, and magic to the B, the same layout they had in Fable 2. Unlike Fable 2, they basically eliminate any customization you had with weapons. In 2, you could expect to pick up a new weapon in every dungeon. Even if it wasn't a better weapon than what you had, you would at least get a choice of what you wanted to use. In this game, most people will be using their original melee weapon and gun the entire game. The reason for this is that they claimed the weapons would "evolve" based on your gameplay. All this means is that when you level up your weapon, it changes appearance, and maybe a little stats, but you have no way of checking that. So we go from having 200+ weapons in the last game, to having less than 30 in this one (and most of those weapons are legendary weapons). In this game, you also only have a total of 6 magic spells, and are not really able to use more than one on the fly. You basically choose one, and stick with that the majority of your time. This doesn't make magic any less overpowered though. If you use nothing but magic the entire game, it would probably cut the difficulty of the game by half (and the difficulty is already a joke). You also have no healthbar- the screen just starts to red when you are about to die, and it gives you the choice to use a potion. To put it in perspective, I died multiple times in 1 and 2, and used at least a 100 potions in each to keep myself alive, in this game I did not die a single time, nor did I use a single health potion. Upgrading has also been worsened. You still get experience, but not nearly as much and there are about 1/5 of the avaliable things to upgrade as in Fable 1 or 2. Before, when trying to upgrade melee weapon strength you would see a number of sub-sections. In addition to upgrading weapons strength, you would have the choice to upgrade health, toughness (armor), or strength (weapon power). In this one, all you upgrade is weapon strength. They took away almost ALL the customization there used to be in upgrading, and turned it into a giant letdown. This used to be one of the huge aspects of the Fable series, and now it is something that is almost entirely left out. Even if they didn't touch is and left it the same as it was in Fable 1 or 2, it would have been much, much better than it is now. To put it in perspective, you had a total of 27 unique attributes you could upgrade in Fable 2, in Fable 3, you have a TOTAL of 48 upgrades. Fifteen to upgrade your melee,gun, and magic (5 levels for each=15 total), fifteen to upgrade your job (in this one you don't upgrade the amount you make on a job from working, you make more from upgrading, and these account for 15 of your total 48 upgrades). So we already have 30 of 48 total upgrades accounted for. Then you also have about 10 upgrades for actions, like buying property, using the kiss emotion, and stuff like that- things that you had right from the get-go in Fable 1 and 2. So a total of 40, plus then the 6 spells you can choose from, which don't really do anything different other than have a different animation. I really don't count the jobs or the emotions as things you should upgrade, so basically you are looking at a total of 270+ upgrades from Fable 2, to 23 TOTAL upgrades in Fable 3. A huuuuuge decline for the series. The world is just as impressive as in Fable 2, but odds are you will not be enjoying it nearly as much. Since you have no reason to go to the shops to upgrade weapons and armor, or to go to the pubs to engage in gambling at the table games, you will most likely go from town to town completing the quests without taking much of the scenery in. If you want to get the "good" ending, you will also have to pretty much buy every avaliable buisness in the entire game. If you want to keep your promise to everyone, it will put you massively in debt. You don't really get any money in this game outside of working at your job or real estate, though it really doesn't become an issue until you become king, because, once again, the lack of purchasable weapons and armor. Once you become king, you will have most likely have made less than 100k total, only to find out that you need to gain 8million to get the good ending. This requires purchasing massive amounts of real estate which will get you about 200k each time once have obtained it all, but takes a long time to get even that much. Overall: This game is, in every single way, a step down from the original 2 games- worse combat, worse upgrades, worse interaction with NPCs, worse quests. I also don't remember the first two being that long, but this one was a joke. I could have beaten it in 10 hours, but because I was forced to farm tons and tons of money through real estate, it tacked on another 4 hours of gameplay, so I could get the good ending. You'll notice that I did not review this as an independent game, but clearly as part of the Fable trilogy. I feel that we have already played this game, and that it is up to the creator change it or not based on how they feel they can make the game better. Obviously, they felt that Fable should be made easier to be open to more people, and in doing so they have destroyed the respect of the Fable franchise that they had built up to this point. I was a very huge fan of the first 2, and was utterly dissapointed in the game. I honestly can not even believe they let the Fable name be put on this piece of junk. If you are a Fable fan, stay far, far away. If you are looking for decently fun hack n slash combat with almost no reward for your efforts, welcome.

How there can even be reviews on here before people have played the game is beyond my comprehension, but I'm just going to throw my two cents in with the fact that both previous Fable games have been superb, and I believe this one will only continue the upward trend. Giving a game you hardly know anything about a negative review is childish, fair judgments can only be made after spending quality time with the product.

This game will be one of my favorites of all times. I have played Fable II for over 400 hours and I still play it just for fun. So when I read about Fable III's release in October, I was ecstatic to learn that I would soon be able to return to the world of Albion. Now I have had a bit of an advantage and have had the wonderful pleasure of trying out this game at a couple different events. From what little I was able to play I was more then satisfied with some of the changes they have made. The combat system is a little more challenging but at the same time a lot more fun. The Dog is now a little more customizable and also seems to play a better role in the game. The new ways that you are able to customize your character almost seem to be limitless. You are now able to customize anything from your hair style to the color of your eyes. There seems to be a vast amount of different outfits that you can wear. They actually have an effect over your characters abilities and combat. Whereas in Fable II they only made your characters appeal higher or lower and only aided in people being more friendly or more afraid of you. The spells work far more streamline and are a bit more practical versus Fable II's slightly bulky and awkward spell system. All around this game is going to be a big improvement to what was already an incredible game. I am excited to see what the finished product will be like and can only imagine that it will be an even greater experience than Fable II. (Also a bit of a side note.) I have read and heard that Fable III will be one of the first Triple A title to be released that will be 100% compatible with Kinect. Which I can only imagine will make the game that much more fun to play.

If you have been a fan or a new comer you will have a good time with this story. It is a fun adventure a little different than the rest before this one as your character can finally speak for a change. The controls are similar to previous games but easy to figure out quickly.