The Queen Has Spoken - Fable III Review

Anyone who has even just heard about the Fable series knows that it's biggest hallmark is the ability to become a living saint or evil incarnate.  Fable III also lets you be good or evil, but halfway through the game, things become radically different from any Fable game has ever been, and good and evil are not as clear cut as they seem.

I tend to be a good guy the first time I play a video game. Well, technically, a good girl, if you can choose gender, but nonetheless, growing up with video games has made me err on the side of the good-willed.  I could not be an outright saint in this game.  If a game decides to make things "harder" for someone to choose between good and evil, that usually means if you go one way in a particular situation, you will end up fighting more enemies, or going through an area with no resistance, or whatever.

Fable III decides not to make it harder for you to be good or evil, but it makes it much much harder to choose between the two. Every choice has a consequence.  Being nice to person A could doom Person B, or you can save Person C by robbing or killing Person D (okay, these may not be actual choices in the game, but you get the idea). This was both added to the game and took away from it.

I do appreciate that a number of games these days that allow choices give you repercussions for all of your choices.  It makes the game more challenging, really. On the other hand, I grew to love Fable as a tongue-in-cheek series, and while there was a good amount of humor in this game, it got really dark, to the point where where I made choices because I  wanted to see what would happen, but because I felt I needed to make that particular choice. I enjoyed the game, but it wasn't what I came to expect from Fable.

Fable III also had a major overhaul on gameplay.  The core magic/melee/ranged combat system was more or less intact, but the leveling system was very much simplified.  There were fewer spells, there were fewer options of which aspect of your character you could upgrade, and there was less customization.  This also applied to the clothing options. You could mix and match, sure, but it simply felt like there were too few options for the character. On the plus side of this all this simplification, however, is that I didn't end up with a muscular man-woman covered in glowing blue glyphs and wearing a pirate outfit!

GRADE: B
Combat gameplay intact, and the weightier options in the good/evil spectrum elevated this third installment in the Fable franchise, but unfortunately, oversimplification brought the game down a few notches.

High Point:
The spell combinations were often hilarious. Vortex + anything was bound to be a blast!
Second Place:
It was nice to actually see how your choices affected the world a bit quicker than in previous games.