Fable is a fun entry into the Fable series, but many missteps brings this game down.
First off, what works? Monarchy is easily the most innovating and fun additions to the game. It's quite challenging (i.e. time consuming) to make popular and good decisions and collect enough funds to build an army to defend Albion it's greatest threat yet (arguable). Or you can make it easy and make corrupt and evil decisions and get tons of money that way, but it's up to you whether to use that money to benefit the people or your own personal treasury.
The fully interactive menus is also an adequate replacement for traditional menus. Fully interactive meaning you can now go though an assortment of rooms in your 'sanctuary ' to equip weapons, change clothes, check stats, and etc, rather than go through a list to do all that.
Other small things that I'm glad to see added are combat animations. It's fun seeing you Hero jump on the shoulder of an enemy mercenary and snap his neck with his legs, or catch a wolf with your hand mid-charge and stab it with your sword. Your Hero is also voiced now. Not fully voiced, there are many parts in the game where the Hero suffers the classic "Link Syndrome", but it's good that he does talk when he needs to. Spell weaving is also very fun. Fireball + Ice Storm, Shock + Swords, Vortex + whatever, it's great.
Ok, now what SUCKS??? First, the shopping and market system is TERRIBLE! Absolutely awful! Now, instead of giving us a list of weapons and items at stores to choose from, they are now on display in the store. This may sound cool, maybe, but not when most stores only display 1-4 items at a time!!! Yeah, each store now only carries a small handful of stock at a time. Say you want to buy a toy bow for your kid, because of the limited select you have to travel across the world to find what you want, if your lucky. You'll have a very difficult time finding what you want a lot of the time.
The weapons have also been destroyed. Whereas, Fable II had 3 types of swords, axes, hammers, 3 types of pistols, and 4 types of rifles, this games only has a pistol, rifle, sword and hammers. Yes, this game does have a larger number of "named" weapons and the weapon morph system is innovating but is it worth it at the cost of the variety of weapon types? I don't think so.
The Expression system has also been stripped down. You no longer get an expression wheel, you now have to walk up to somebody, press A to interact with that person and perform 1 type of expression, nice, mean and rude. You can't choose any particular expression, you have to perform the expression the game has choose for you.
The main problem is that Lionhead is attempting to dumb down Fable in order to appeal to a wider, dumber audience. This is insanely lame and is NOT how to make a sequel. This is the WORST Fable yet! Simplifying is not necessarily improving.
Fable III at least feels like a Fable game, it hasn't lost that. It still has it's trademark humour. It still has charm, thankfully.
Please Lionhead, fix your missteps. If this game hadn't f*****d up in all those areas, I might have given this game a solid 9, even 9.5. Fable III is quite disappointing. If you like Fable and/or Fable II, you'll enjoy this. If you didn't like those games, you won't like this, though you might get a kick out of the Monarchy section of the game, but the novelty of that will wear off eventually.
So there you go, Fable III, I hope Fable IV will be better.
EDIT: I should also mention that many players have reported several "game breaking" glitches. I haven't encountered any yet, which is why I didn't mention it in my review. A few technical hiccups here and there, but that's it. I just thought I should mention it.
I should also mention that I'm using the "Angry Joe Rating System". Where as a 5 or 6 score review is a "bad game" on Gamespot, it's average on the the AJRS.