Fable III

Obsessed with teaching a lesson in morality, Fable III loses focus on its charm, and is far less interesting for it. [Aug 2011, p.64]

Despite some welcome attention to detail in this port, it's still not enough to raise it to the heights of 'must play' for an action RPG whose charm, humour and some genuinely interesting ideas aren't strong enough to battle against how unchallenging it is and how repetitive a lot of tasks can become.

Fable III proves to be a pretty unstable mix, with good visual value, but an excessive simplification of the gameplay. You might get to finish it once and then go on with any remaining secondary missions. Still, there's no life after that; the fights are boring, enemies stupid and the story too thin.

So it came to pass that Molyneux's latest epic was brought unto Windows. Though it was a port lacking in polish, with graphics below those of the modern age, the people embraced it as a rarity. Gritty but immature, dark yet not steeped in the occult, it stood out amongst the science fiction and horror-fantasy that dominated the marketplace.

Fable's wide open world is beautifully designed and wonderful to explore. The programming effort to shape the destiny of a nation in a fantasy setting was achieved only in part though. While its deep social interaction shines, the real gameplay is flawed by poor and uninteresting mechanics, from the quests to the shallow combat system.

Fable III lands on the PC with graphical enhancements and tougher combat, but simplified gameplay and a lack of moral choices still distract from the fun.

Quotation forthcoming.

Lionhead haven't spent much efforts on bringing this to the PC. It's still too simplified in everything from the choices you make to the story.

Fable III is a good game but the original contents of the PC version do not convince and, at the same price, there are other more interesting titles.

As I said, this is still Fable III which means it's as divisive as ever.

In Fable III you can purchase houses, buy businesses, get married, and have kids. Like B&W you have a pet, a dog in this case, but he's more useful and less idiosyncratic, and you can train him to help you in combat and he sniffs out treasure for you. By and large good stuff. Those things work. And in general dealing with the leaders of the various towns to get them to ally with you is good RPG fodder (and deciding later whether or not to keep the promises you make is an interesting wrinkle). But the dreary nature of performing menial tasks repeatedly with individual people to scrape experience? Not so much. In fact as an activity it likely ranks down there with gold farming. And while it was ludicrous as a god to be expected to find every lost child, as a prince trying to stabilize an entire kingdom it's only slightly less asinine. And in Fable III it's all been linked together, inextricably.

An acceptable, lighthearted RPG that's often too simple, too staid and too black and white to be much fun.

A fun, light-hearted romp, but one that pales in light of its predecessors. [Aug 2011, p.68]

For a game that tries so hard to get under your skin, Fable III rarely manages to do much more than scratch the surface.