Fable was a game that I eventually fell in love with. It was everything I wanted from a game, and its PC excursion with The Lost Chapters only rekindled my love of the game.

I never took issue with the length of the game, nor do I with Fable 2, because the title alone tells you it's a short story - And that's exactly what you get.

I followed Fable 2 with a rabid fanboyism that'd put a lot of the Halo fanbase to shame - I was really looking forward to the game, and it's taken me this long to explore what I feel is every option within it. It's not like I've played it every day, but I've certainly played the game through sufficiently to know which quests go where (And rather sadly enough, where half the 'go find' quests go without reading the quest cards).

The game itself plays very much in the same way the first one did. It was announced early in the development that the game would feature 'one button combat'. Which it did. One button for each of the three aspects of the Hero. That's not strictly true, you can change your spell list on the fly using Right Trigger and the d-pad, so.. Eight button combat, if you want to get pedantic.

A lot of people on a number of forums, who claimed to have played Fable/Fable: TLC, were confused by this. I never understood why, because the first games used 'one button combat' in much the same way. Infact, the control scheme has only really changed enough to accommodate the change in controller layout and button locations. I think there lay some confusion and upset with the idea for this system when Molyneux did what he does best - Opening his mouth. There was a non-rendered tech demo of a character using the scenery to fight opponents, which never made it into the game. It looked cool, but in all practicality, it was useless, and thus canned.

The control scheme, being much the same, lent itself to being damned good - For players of the first game, there was just some relocation of buttons, and for new players, it was all very simple and easily picked up.

The fable itself starts as the last game did, you as a child performing menial tasks to earn gold. In this case, to buy a magical box (Which, despite the incredibly short appearance, goes on to be one of the focal parts of the ending sequence). This childhood area is far more advanced than the first one - The options for good and bad cause massive differences in the game later on. The game lends itself to favoring good characters in this respect, and that trend carries on through the game. Evil is, well, evil. Everything suffers when you're an evil character, even to the point where you can't easily (and by that I mean, the only way to grab one of them is painstaking rebuilding of communities, hours of work, pots of gold, and a damned halo) grab all the achievements.

The start also sees your character meeting the infamous dog, which turned out to be a massive disappointment, thanks to Molyneux. Initially the dog was set to play a large part in the Heros good/bad alignment, much the same way that the temples used to morph in Black & White. Unfortunately it was decided that this took too much attention from the Hero. I am entirely confused as to how, but hey. This is Molyneux - The master of promising and talking about what he cannot provide. It turned out that the dog merely changes colour depending on your characters moral barometer. Not a major setback, but certainly a disappointment.

The character morphs based on good and evil are very, very subtle to start with. To the point where it's almost impossible to tell what's happening down either path until you either have horns or a halo. They're very good, but at the same time, let down by the engine it seems. There was one occasion where my evil Hero was going into a load zone with what would be considered 'normal' skin, hair and eyes for a Fable character (Seriously, someone needs to check their anatomy classes out. Humans are not built like upturned isosceles triangles with grey skin), and on the other side, was 'IBM Stealth Grey' skin colour, with orange/red cracks all over, and horns down to her chin:



The same was true for the 'good' side to the path. One moment I was walking around as 'normal', the next I had a halo and farted rainbows. The engine does not seem to be able to keep up with the supposed real-time body morphs. I can forgive it that, though, because those horns are pretty badass.

The story length is dependent on the effort and time you want to put in. If you want to do all the quests, jobs, and buying of real estate, then you're in for a long ride. If you're content to plow through the main quests, then you should be able to knock it out in around a days worth of playing. It's not long, but then, it tells you that to start with. The story makes one iota less than sense, but that's to be expected for a Molyneux game, these days. There doesn't seem to be much of a requirement to play the first game, other than for some basic geographical knowledge, and an idea as to who the 'mysterious' reader, Theresa. Though, if you posses the internet and no desire to sit through the first one, then you should be fine without it. It's not like it's complex.

There is multiplayer. I am not a fan of it, to be quite honest. It was fairly well incorporated, but the tethering system makes for a very frustrating experience when you're trying to do the quests. I am also not a fan of the 'henchman' system for the game. The official reasoning is that the game focuses on the hosts Hero, adding another would detract from that. I'm at a loss as to how that would even begin to affect the game, as the majority of the quests etc are only started by the host. Whatever the guest does in the hosts world affects the host too, so I'm seriously confused as to their thought process on that. Then again, it is Molyneux.

The replay value is minimal to most people. I've played through god knows how many times now, and I still enjoy it, but I can see most players playing it once and dropping it, which is fair enough really.

Lionhead are trying to breathe life back into the game with DLC (Who isn't trying that these days?), but until I play it, I'm not holding my breath.

Fable 2 hasn't changed my love for Fable 1, but it's certainly made me slightly more wary of what will end up as Fable 3. Sadly, I can't see the future yet, so I'll just have to wait and see what happens.