A playable game with good parts ruined by incomprehensibly bad design decisions
Then today, I reached a point of rage inducing frustration that will make me put the game back in the box & never open it again. I won't resell it, because I don't want to take responsibility for anybody else experiencing what I just went through. So, in the usual review format:
The Good:
Streamlined well balanced combat
Excellent detailed game world that can be roamed freely
Some exceptionally well written sequences
The Bad:
Compares badly to Fable II in complexity
Repetitive & fascile relationships with most world denizens
ONE UNBELIEVABLY BAD DESIGN DECISION THAT WILL MAKE YOU REGRET EVER PICKING THIS GAME UP IN THE FIRST PLACE
So, for people who haven't played Fable II, what are you in for? It's a third person fantasy swords & pistols RPG, with some effort made to make the world believable, with a vast number of citizens going about their daily lives scattered across a beautifully detailed world map. There are many different quests to complete, and a wide array of bad-guys to fight, although in each case, the variety is limited. Quests are all basically go-here-and-survive, while bad-guys are almost all other human-shaped antagonists with swords, guns and occasionally magic. To counter the repetitive nature of the follow-the-mcGuffin plot, the game uses top notch voice acting and humour to keep you interested enough to find out where each quest goes.
For those of you who have played Fable II, this will all sound familiar. What has changed? Well, much of the complexity has dropped away. There are fewer magical powers, a narrower range of bad-guys to fight, and fewer real choices to be made than the original. The villager scripts and voice actors have increased in variety, but are still pretty repetitive. And mini-games are fewer in number, such as the arena and the firing range. Also, your characters looks are largely static, with only a small range of clothes and dyes for those clothes available to you. You won't be becoming tall, fat or visibly evil.
The first demonstration of any quality writing takes place quite late in the game, and I don't want to spoiler anyone so I won't describe it. But I will say, unusually for a AAA title, there is a lot of B grade material in the game at the start, and it isn't until quite far in that you reach a section where the designers have shown some vision and created a truly beautiful and memorable scene.
Unfortunately, despite all the good, there is a part of this game that is so axiomatically bad that I can only recommend anyone to completely avoid this game. A decision of such awe-inspiring lack of foresight, it makes me wonder if the person putting all the bits of the game together has ever actually worked in software before.
Towards the end of the game, your objective is to collect gold to defend Albion. You have a clear objective of how much gold you need, and how much time you have. Only unless you transfer the gold from your private treasury, it does no good. Then, without any warning at all or any possibility of recovery, it takes all your remaining time away.
There are some basic rules to making a user control easy & not irritating. One is that it should be clear what the consequences of doing something are when you do it. Another is that, wherever possible, changes should be reversible, so if you make a mistake you can undo it. By completing an unrelated quest, the game goes from stating you have plenty of time remaining, to telling you your entire kingdom has been destroyed. And you can't reload, because the game doesn't implement save points. Even should you have all the resources you need to save everything, you won't be given the chance to use them. So, a game about building your kingdom over dozens of hours will, without warning, destroy everything you have built up as a surprise after lulling you into a false sense of security, and will not let you undo it.
This drops the game for me from a "Good, with moments of genius" 8/10 to a thoroughly earned 1/10. I don't think I could give a purely awful game such a low rating, because at least it wouldn't lead me on. A bad game that starts bad only wastes a few minutes of your life. This will suck away hours and hours, and make you wish you'd never touched it.
Unless you want to play from a faq from the beginning to the end, don't touch this title.