Fun at first, but then lacking in many areas.
Graphically the game itself is amazing while still holding the Fable charm, water looks beautiful and fluid, the zones you visit are tailored to draw you in and immerse you into the beautiful world.
As with all RPG games there is an emphasis during design to make the Magic of the game flashy and cool, Fable III delivers here and makes you want to mix together spells blasting away targets to see the different effects.
Graphics were about what I suspected with Fable III, but the downside of the game is the frame rate issues where the game will slow down to a near crawl randomly. Installing Fable III to your Hard-drive (XBOX) does not improve the frame rate burps much to my dismay.
During the previous Fables you would age and your hero would stop looking cool, but Fable III keeps you the same age throughout the whole game preventing you from loosing your coolness factor.
----=== Sound / Music ===----
The musical score falls right into line and is quite enjoyable, and the sounds that are generated during combat and within towns are perfect.
The only time anything happened sound wise that was unenjoyable is when the game attempted to play too many villager sounds at once making it sound like 20 people were all yelling in a small room, but the game does catch up and stop playing all the sounds at once pretty quickly.
----=== Game Play : Combat ===----
If you've never played a Fable before you will still recognize the tried and true hack and slash aspects of the game with the classic smash this, kill that, blow up that, and dump magic death upon these unsuspecting fools.
The hack and slash game play does not get old quickly as you're always looking for and finding new ways to slaughter the many diverse enemies that exist within the game. From the classic Hobbes to the Sand Gypsy you'll always find something to kill, and not always the same way as the game requires a plethora of strategies when fighting its many enemies in an enjoyable way.
With three different ways to attack your enemies you find many different ways to engage and destroy them, and you are also not limited to just one of them. As a true Hero you can master Melee, Magic, and Guns then incorporate them into your strategies. A personal favorite is to hit an enemy with a melee weapon knocking him down turning and killing another target with a spell then shoot behind me without looking killing the first enemy.
----=== Game Play : Story ===----
I will not be revealing any spoilers to you about the story in this segment.
The story is like all Fable stories where there is a bad guy and you have decisions to make, people to save or slaughter, money to make and spend, and a world to save.
Fable also has a Karma system where the evil things you do will stick with you, but so will the good things. If you slaughter a town, it will affect you in more ways then just people being afraid of you, your body will change, your eyes will darken, and you will be evil incarnate. If you follow the path of good, you will save many, people will love you, although within the story it is a harder path to follow and definitely more expensive it is enjoyable.
In the beginning money is harder to come by until about half way through when you can start purchasing homes and businesses. Sadly once you can begin purchasing homes and businesses money rolls in quickly, and pretty soon you'll have no where to spend it. You have to repair homes (More if you raise the rent-evil-, less if you reduce it-good-), but not businesses. If planned accordingly your empire can net you a cool million in ten minutes.
The decision aspect of the game is the same as it was in Fable II, an event occurs and your decisions shape the world around you. Destroying cities, rebuilding cities, areas could be evil or good depending on your choices, and lakes could be filled with water or drained and destroyed.
Sadly with the decisions there isn't much thought in them, no consequences for choosing either way, no outcome really matters except to experience the different sides of the extremely linear story line that only branches off to come back into itself and continue on the same line.
----=== Multiplayer ===----
The multiplayer aspect is interesting although I've found lacking depth and overall replay value. You can only have a co-op session with only two people, the monsters in the game do not scale to increase difficulty when another player joins your game. Once you join a game your characters story goes on hold and you become a Henchmen, which is fun, you can enter into business partnerships, gain achievements, and experience the game the same way as if you were playing it alone although much easier.
If both players are of the same strength when you start the game is more enjoyable, but if one has even a minor upper hand in strength its a bloodbath with you running to try to keep up.
Within the Road-to-Rule you find Co-op plinths where if you advance in the story not only will the host appear on his own plinth whomever was the co-op partner during the session will appear on the other plinth which is pretty cool and you can see how both players change from the first plinth to the last, but after the first few you kind of stop caring about it and never go back to look.
----=== Achievements ===----
Most achievements are gained during the story, exploring, or just killing stuff, but there are a couple achievements that require multiplayer to complete. The achievements are easy enough to get with the exception of the Collect all 50 weapons achievement. (Don't have Live or a friend with Fable 3? Create another account on your Xbox, launch Fable 3 and gather all the weapons you can then join with another controller to give them all to your main save. You can also get the Henchmen fee's achievement this way).
----=== Replay ===----
Once or twice if you want to see events from a different aspect, but there isn't any content there worth having you come back to play unless your an achievement whore like I am then you'll stick around just long enough to gain the achievements then shelf it until we get some decent DLC.
----=== Overall / Final Thoughts ===---
The game had high expectations for me as I've played each installation of the Fable series, I own all of the F2 DLC and will probably go back to get the rest of the achievements I've missed.
Some games I enjoy enough to want them to release DLC to continue the game so I can enjoy more of the great work from the developers, sadly with Fable III I feel like DLC will be the only saving grace on turning the game into a finished product. With a highly dissatisfying last end boss, lack of decisions, frame rate chop, a game that is far too easy, lack of multiplayer options, and a lack luster finish Lionhead will need to get on the ball and make some DLC that will make Fable III worth me returning to it any time soon.
7.5 Overall, and worth two play throughs at minimum but not much more than that.