Lacks too much
The whole family system in Fable 2 is garbage in general considering the fact you can get divorced for every little d*mn thing. The game itself is poorly designed with a truck load of anoyying glitches that are easily noticable and bothersome to say the least. The game freezes most of the time and still bares the crappy slow loading times between places when you leave and enter. As for the glitches as I mentioned, you will often get stuck or in my case I was evil, then shut off the game and ended up with a halo instead of horns when I turned the system back on. I left the town and my horns and dark skin returned. There were also times when people were afraid of me for no reason why my hero was 100% good with no negative actions performed not even once. Sometimes a guard would randomly arrest me. If thats not the case, then talk to the black screen I've recieved from 4 different returned copies played on two fresh new consoles. All the game does is crashes like a bad computer game.
I also have to point out that Peter and his team did a awful job with adding in content. He is good at telling lies, he says that no ones Hero will look like anyone elses but the sad truth is. Your hero will look like everyone elses because Fable 2 has very few outfits and hairstyles and every last one of them suck miserbly. Some outfits in the game are okay but you have to wear the same boots with every single one. My personal favorite is the highway man outfit which is about the only interesting outfit in the game. The new Will user coat isn't bad once you have the hat to go with it.
Peter thought that just because you can change the outfits colors thats suppose to mean you'll look different from someone elses hero online which is total BS. Other than these problems, I can only say that Fable 2 wasn't worth waiting the extra days on October just to obtain a game that still lacks story, and once again your seeing the same NPC characters who do absublutly nothing besides wandering around in circles repeating the same junk to you. Once they get to the point where they love your hero, you have to deal with 100s of the same NPCs asking you to get them a ring.
Peter's character development team is so lazy, they also made even the low life characters high classed. Almost 90% of all NPC's in the game prefer to be married before s*x. And even though c*doms are in the game, getting STDs doesn't do anything to your hero. I purposly got 45 STDs and my hero still looks normal, still fights normal. At least when you drink or eat you see the effects of gaining weight. But the aspect of getting STDs and not seeing any effect of it on your character is pointless to have in the game.
I have to say I was hoping that Fable 2 would be greater than this but I had a feeling it wasn;t going to be.
Some of the good things about the game is the new combat system. You can forget about bows because guns are allot more fun to use. The only problem is you can no longer daze the enemies anymore and behead them with a melee weapon unless you counter them first. Other wise you can just shoot off their head..Which doesn't make much sense unless you had something like a rocket launcher. Even a shotgun at close range isn't capable of blowing someones head entirely off their body unless they were to stick it into their mouth and pull the trigger.
Other than combat, I'll have to say that you can own any building in the game which is great! Although owning a building you can't rent out like the Temple of Shadows is quite useless since you can't have a kid there. The temple itself is empty, and though the wheel of despair (my term for it) may seem fun at first but its just stupid how there are torchure devices all over the temple of Shadows but you cant use any of them on the victims. Instead you just pull a lever and witness a quick invisble death of someone getting transformed into these demons, impalement, or my personal favorite switching their gender around and being able to have kids with a woman thats actually a guy. Though it would of been better if there were all ready third genders in the game to add diversity.
The ability to choose how you want to be evil or good is way more acceptable now than ever. If you choose to be evil but pure you won't grow the ugly horns. Instead your skin changes into a pale like green color and make you look like a ghoul. If you choose to be half evil your skin will be pale white like a vampire. If your corrupt but good, you become more irritated in the eyes with glowing green eyes instead of red. If your all the way evil and corrupt you grow the horns "BUT" you also transform into a full demon. Being good and pure makes you more clean looking and your hair changes blond.
So its allot better than it was in the first game, giving you different ways to choose how you look.
Fable 2 does have a great soundtrack this time around, although some places are quiet. I have to say that quests could be more longer and allot more rewarding. Earning gold doesn't give you much to do other than to buy buildings. The choices you make, also has no real effect on anything. If you choose to side with the Shadows and destroy the Temple of Light, when you come back 10 years later after the events in the Spire. The only thing that has changed in that town where the temple of light is. Is the Temple is in ruins, the village itself is smoothered by fog. When instead the town should of been over runned by Shadows, with the new Temple of Shadow rebuilt into a flourishing evil catheral. Instead the Temple of Shadow remains as the same ugly burned down building it once was when you last saw it.
Choices in Fable 2 don't do much because they are all so predictible. The choices you make are easy to determine. Like giving the warrants to the thug instead of the guard will just make Oldtown bowerstone look the same as it did when you were a kid. Only more beat up, yet if you marry a bum or poor person they still b*tch and complain about the way your house look just like the wealthy or middle class NPCs. When you take out your weapon in Bloodstone or the other lawless town where you first encounter the balverines. The people there are suppose to be thugs and vicious, yet they coward in fear when they see your sword unshealthed. Speaking of shealths you would think that they would have them in the game instead of seeing your blade glued to your back.
I can't really give Fable 2 high scores because it was a let down. Yes the game is addictive but there is no way this game should be identical to the first one in any way as a long awaited sequel. Sometimes I wonder how Peter got away with ruining this game. When I look at Shenmue 1 and 2 I noticed it is the only game in history that doesn't have the same NPC characters. It seems like Peter and his team lacked the idea of creating different characters in fable 2. And for some reason the main characters can't be found anywhere in the game unless its during a mission where you have to work with them. Other wise its like they are dead in Albion. You can rush through this game really fast without even having to upgrade anything. All you must do is find three heroes and your at the end. Its that simple, locate three of them which you meet the first one right from the beginning once your an adult after getting out of the cave.
The only way I can score this game higher is if Peter does another lost chapter and adds more into it and make the game the way the first Fable 2 game was suppose to be. Because to me it seems like he wanted to restrict us again. By not allowing you to sell children into slavery even though trafficking is wrong even if its an adult being sold. But its a video game, so why limit? Why be able to bring adult characters into danger but not children? Is it right to see an adult slaughtered by wrong to see a child slaughtered? I've seem lots of Japanese Roleplaying games have children characters in them slayed. Peter is afraid of being ridiculed by morons who probably read books with children in them being killed and I know movies aren't afraid to go there either.
Other limitations is like having a child in Fable 2 but your limited to only 1 child. You can't have 2 or more. And the fact that you can't use the furniture doesn't add anything into the game. H*ll if you break into someones house or find a house without a door on it, you can hear people inside sleeping but you don't see them in the bed like you could in the first game. ANd why black out the screen during s*x? There are ways to do this without revealing too much. Once again Peter is a lying chicken. His team? Pathetic at designing characters and quick at slapping a game together that scored a high ranking for what it was worth. A crash fest that lacks content and playability.