Fable II

No excuses this time - it's judgement day for Lionhead.

	Version Xbox 360	Developer Lionhead	Publisher Microsoft	Genre RPG

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The countryside is almost as beautiful as Oblivion in many scenes, and I received a real fright the first time a mountainside cliff came to life as a Demon Door and asked me to act for it. Lighting effects in the cities are especially gorgeous. Fable's design is beautiful, and the protagonist's animations superb. Having a dog follow you around may annoy some, however the little mutt is an exceptional tracker and has a nose fine tuned to gold. Pay attention when he barks and you'll be a wealthy explorer in no time.

There are some issue with clipping - your dog frequently runs straight through solid objects (including your legs), however this does grant him the benefit of not becoming stuck behind objects in typical NPC fashion. As I said earlier, voice acting is superb, but not just from the stars. A lot of the dialogue is hammy enough to demand a good helping of HP brown sauce over it, but this usually adds to the charm. Indeed, one of the Assassination missions is to kill someone for "Uttering the same lines over and over again"!

My biggest gripes with Fable are relatively minor. You can race through the main storyline in around a dozen hours or so - although ignoring the side quests is missing the point with a title like this. Working jobs or extending expressions to impress all involve nothing more than good timing with the A button. It doesn't matter what job you happen to be doing either.

When playing as a despotically evil bisexual nympho psycho maniac, we managed to slaughter our way through a dozen citizens and guards before being offered prison, a huge fine, or community service. Not wanting to part with any cash, and looking forward to earning some more (generously awarded) experience points, we picked community service. We then realised that you never actually need to complete your community service (despite the guards reminding you that you do) and carried on rampaging through other towns, being caught, and offering to do more community service. It's not game-breaker, but there should have been a limit in place so failure to complete your service meant either jail time or a fine to face the consequences of your actions.

Death also seems to let you off the hook lightly - your character is immortal, but can be knocked out by enemy creatures, costing you experience points. It should be a fair measure, however it is not uncommon for your character to get back up, defeat the remaining enemies and receive more experience points in doing so than they lost.

You do receive a scar each time you die, but we were playing a demonically visaged overweight gay horror Pat "Butcher", who was happy to show off the battle scars as she threatened the local children for their lolly pops. She even managed to charm a beggar to marry her, got a love groove down in the bedroom, then killed him after the baby came along. No surprise then that the Child Support Agency removed the child from our house for protection!

Unfortunately the full benefit of Xbox Live was not available at review stage, however Lionhead have confirmed a patch will be out for release date, meaning you and a friend can play co-operatively in your own world. You can play co-op on your couch straight out of the box too.

It's this level of interaction, the constant search for the next skill or power and Lionhead's greatest achievement - making you want to tinker with every aspect of the world - that catapults Fable II above generic action adventure titles into the realm of "Classics".

Now if you'll excuse me I need to go and find some celery to munch on as I'd like to see what "Butcher" looks like as a size zero psycho demon hotty - and she needs to eat healthily if I'm going to find out.

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