Fable III Games
With the Fable franchise finally returning to the PC, a lot
of questions were certainly raised. Concerns about its status as a port
were pretty high among them, as the series has certainly been born and
raised on Microsoft hardware. Thankfully, while Fable III
hasn't changed much from the content of the original Xbox 360 release,
it seems to have mostly shrugged off that yoke. At its core, the game is
still the enjoyable romp through a fantasy world, but a good chunk of
its gameplay comes across as dated.The story of this third installment puts you in the shoes of a prince or a princess, and with either selection, you play as a sibling to the reigning king of the land. After an expedition a few years back, the king has become a tyrannical leader, and he has been mercilessly driving the populace into poverty and despair. Your first moral choice in the game isn't an easy one, as you must choose whether a group of citizens or your boyfriend/girlfriend is to be executed, and it is at that point that your cushy life as a member of the royal family becomes the life of a hero and a revolutionary. The people desperately need a leader to help them overthrow the king, and through no accident, that person becomes you.
After escaping from the castle, you are set
on the path to becoming the kingdom's newest hero, helping the populace
to earn their support and gather a large enough army to start a
revolution. As you complete quests, kill enemies, or interact with
citizens, you gain hero points, which can be spent in the various
sections of the Road to Rule. For the most part, how you gain these
points and how you spend them is truly up to you.
The Road to Rule
is accessible at any time and is split up into various sections. Each
section contains one or more chests that can be opened by spending hero
points, which reward you with improving your abilities or unlocking a
slew of new actions. For example, you can upgrade your melee abilities,
unlock new magic spells, gain the ability to use new expressions in
dealing with people, or enable the ability to own property. New sections
of the Road to Rule are unlocked as you progress through the game,
essentially functioning as a physical manifestation of the narrative
thread. Every section you unlock saves your current look as a statue
next to the gate, so by the end of it, you can walk through and see how
your look evolved over time.
The way that you choose to play Fable
III is entirely up to you, and while nearly every action has
repercussions both good and bad, they are all valid options. A series
hallmark, this allows you to shape the world to some extent, not only
affecting how people on the street react to your presence but also how
your character and weapons develop in their styling. Some weapons are
only leveled up by doing evil actions, and conversely, some are only
leveled up by being a goody two-shoes. Then again, another weapon is
leveled up by getting fat, so it's not as if everything in the
game revolves around your moral compass.
Regardless of your demeanor or methods, you
will spend a lot of time in combat, but how you choose to do so is
similarly up to you. There are three combat modes available: magic,
melee and ranged. Magic is where the game sees the most variation,
allowing you to utilize different magic spells for different purposes.
The selection is fairly exemplary of your standard schools of magic,
hurling fireballs to damage targets or using ice to slow them down.
Since magic doesn't require mana to cast, not unlike how guns don't
require ammo, you are free to roll around and spam magic every which
way. However, this also makes playing a mage feel awfully similar to the
gunplay, and like guns, it can be difficult to pick a specific enemy to
attack. For the most part, you end up flinging spells in the general
direction of the enemy group.
Melee combat makes use of your
equipped melee weapon, which is limited to the two categories of hammers
and swords. Actually fighting off opponents is a simple matter of
mashing the left mouse button while facing an enemy and holding
right-click to block. However, melee combat is often very cumbersome if
you are fighting more than one enemy at a time thanks to
less-than-nimble controls and enemies' tendencies to dog pile on you.
Similarly, ranged combat consists of the use of two categories of
firearms, pistols or rifles, but seems less sluggish because by its very
nature, you run around and take potshots at enemies rather than going
toe-to-toe with them.
The entire game doesn't revolve around
combat, as you still have a life to lead that doesn't involve stabbing
or scorching a brigand. Much as in the other games of the series, you
can own property, first by buying and optionally renting out houses and
culminating in owning shops and getting your share of their profits. You
reap these rewards every five minutes automatically, just as long as
you occasionally go to the main map and pay the upkeep on all property
with a couple of button presses (and admittedly a few thousand gold).
It's entirely possible to become a real estate magnate before you get
your hands dirty; with a steady stream of profits coming in, you can
easily buy that shiny new weapon or fancy set of clothes.
The
interaction with your denizens pays dividends in providing you with a
small sum of hero points, so it's a good idea to spend some time getting
to know them. Interactions are limited to simply holding down the key
of the action you wish to perform until the game prompts you to release
it, and the possible actions range from being polite, being a jerk, and
clucking like a chicken. As you become friends with people, you can
eventually become lovers with them, both in the singular and
simultaneous plural sense. It factors back into your reputation either
way, though promiscuity certainly leads to an army of kids to care for
and a decidedly horrible amount of STDs.
Though Fable III feels structurally
solid in that all the right parts are in all the right places, it still
seems to have issues with shrugging off an overall feeling that the
game's time has already come and gone. The combat's sluggish feel and
wonky targeting doesn't make it less fun but certainly less refined, and
interacting with people comes across as a downright robotic derivative
of actual communication; you can simply do the same actions for every
conversation, and everyone will love you for it, regardless of what type
of people they are. These flaws don't sink the title as much as they
easily spoil the potential.
The game pulls off some pretty
impressive graphics in a blending of exaggerated features and color that
does well to solidly deliver a fantasy world. Lighting and shadows are
used subtly but to great effect, making towns really come to life and
dank caverns seem all the more ominous. Though many of the design
elements are clearly carted over from the Xbox 360 right down to the
colors used for options, the UI doesn't suffer from it and comes across
as quite functional. The PC iteration's status as a port broke very few
things but amped up the presentation significantly.
While the
porting process didn't harm the game, Fable III has a solid yet
decidedly dated core. Combat is fun but has a slew of issues that
detract from what it otherwise could have been, and that's a sentiment
that could just as easily to be applied to most of the game. Fable
III is a good game that is worth diving into, and you'll end up
having a great time right up to the conclusion. At the same time, it
feels like a game that tries to do too many great things and just
settles on being decent instead.
Labels: Games
posted by Adrian73 @ 3:00 AM
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