Fable III is the third entry in Peter Molyneux's series of very English RPGs. You'll face complicated moral decisions, fight menacing monsters all while starting a family and investing your money in real estate to gain millions of coins worth of profit.
That's the theory anyway.
The start of the game gives off an amazing feeling of freedom and grand scale. You're the son of the (now dead) king of Albion. Your older brother is the current king and he is doing a pretty horrible job with it. His daily duties seem to consist of being a dick, killing people and being an asshole. Off you go on an adventure to overthrow the king and be a good king.
OR a bad king
'cause MORAL CHOICES!
The basic gameplay consists of doing your average RPG quests around the world for the various folks, gaining their trust and support for the upcoming assault against the king. The combat system is excellent... at being the worst combat system I can remember in any game I've played anytime recently. You can use your melee weapon, your ranged weapon or your magic to murder various baddies, but you only have one button for attacking, so it's all very button mashy. Having three different weapons available at all times doesn't set you up for awesome combos. All it does is give you the oppurtunity to select which colours fly around the screen as you button mash. There is no penalty for death, which removes any need to even try to think about your fighting. It doesn't help that the game seems to have 3 different enemy types in it which it throws at you in way too many numbers way too often. The quests you go on feel very by-the-numbers. There are a couple in there that twist the formula a little bit, but the twist occurs in the set-up of your quest. The actual part where you play it still consists of navigating an area and occasionally hitting monsters.
Other than doing quests for them, you can gain support of the people by interacting with them around town. Interacting with NPCs in this game is so completely stupid that if you made me choose between playing a Dead or Alive volleyball game in front of other people or Fable III, I might just choose Dead Or Alive instead. You walk up to someone in the street, act like an idiot by making stupid sounds come out of you and then fart in their faces. The animation and sounds and everything about it looks and sounds like a bad parody of a children's cartoon.
Farting in the face and being otherwise an idiot in front of people you meet sounds like the recipe to get punched in the face right? Nope, that's how I found my first wife. Your "relationship" won't move to the next level before you complete a stupid fetch quest which fully has nothing to do with anything.The NPCs are all completely generic background actors with absolutely nothing to them, and their only forms of interaction with you are "yay!" and "boo!" To move around the area with another character you have to hold hands with them. While this might look appropriate when you are doing so with your girlfriend, having to do it to escort an escaped convict back to the guards is just hilarious in all the wrong ways. The funniest part about it is that the handholding animation often breaks and leaves the two people separated by a small distance, so you can often see the criminal running to catch up to you so he could grab your hand. The entire process of interacting with NPCs seems like it was designed by a 5 year old.
The Fable series has claimed since the first game that it features deep moral dilemmas. Throughout the game these mostly boil down to "You can kill this man if you'd like to do so, or not" No actual moral decisions are presented to you until the few final hours of the game, and even then you get a dozen variants of the same exact decision thrown in front of you.
Those moral decisions are executed in the worst possible way I can think of. To avoid spoilers, I'm going to provide you with an analog:
Timmy and Jimmy have an apple to share. It is up to you to decide how that apple is divided. The obvious good option is to split the apple in half, right? But in Fable III, when you press the "Cut it in half" option, your character says "Both of you are so fucking fat that eating an entire apple is way too much for you fatasses!"
And then he spits in their faces.
That's how every single one of those moral decisions late in the game goes down. There's the clear cut, obvious-even-to-a-dead-monkey "good" option, which you can't select because the game, for some godawful reason, deems to be the option for the worst of the Hitler-channeling tyrants playing this game. The option the game thinks is the actual good one is like if you'd split the apple in half, let both of the boys have a bite, and then shot both of them in the face.
In other words, this game has no clue whatsoever what the words good and bad even mean, much less does it know how to present you with a complicated situation where you'll actually have to think about which way you are going to go. The game tries so hard to put across a message to people about how politics work it completely missed the fact that what they are actually presenting is bullshit.
There's a way to circumvent the entire situation near the end and have it so that everybody ends up happy, but doing so requires you to have paid attention to something the game never tells you is something you should have payed attention to. It's not a "If only you had done this" moment, it's a rage-inducing completely out of nowhere left turn that feels like it's only there to piss you off.
Throughout all of this you have to put up with the most baffling interface out there. In normal games, if you want to switch out your weapons, manage your items and do other business like that, you hit the menu button and do it.
This game is way to innovative for an easy-to-use system like that. If you hit the menu button, you get teleported to a hub area where you physically have to walk your character in the armory or the treasury to check out your items or your money. This adds needles filler to the game. Just something to make you spend more time with it. The game has enough of that already.
You can't even see a map in-game. You have to teleport yourself to the menu room and walk up to the map to see it.
Also, this HUD thing that gives you essential information while playing the game like your character's health? Hey fuck that, let's innovate! How about you get absolutely nothing. No way to see how much health you have, no way to see how many health potions you have. Also, you can only use health potions when the game thinks you need one.
Fable III is a painfully boring, hilariously pretentious, lazy, and obviously quickly cobbled together trainwreck of a game. The fact that it's presented well might divert (and has diverted) people's attention away from how broken everything about it really is.
YOU'LL RATE THIS HIGHER IF:
*You think that good voice acting and presentation are enough of a trade for a boring and thoroughly un-fun experience.
*You find fart jokes hilarious
*You stop playing the game right before the final act and pretend that was it
