Promising at first, before falling down a never-ending pit. Fable III is the most disappointing game of all time.
But Fable III really takes the cake.
This game starts off brilliantly; a strenuous choice and a pumping rush into exile with John Cleese by your side as you plot to take over the throne of Albion from your tyrannous brother Logan. However it was mostly downhill rolling from there.
Let's start with the positives. Fable III is a beautiful game. Its art design is impeccable, and really overcomes the flaws of the first two games. The franchise's third installment is the first to contend as a real visual masterpiece.
The voice-work of the main characters is the best I've seen from most games -- barring the Mass Effect games. The VOs of the common villagers, guards and the like, however, is something that's nothing to write home about. Simon Pegg, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, they're all brilliant.
The start of the game is very promising. You feel like you're in for a hell of a ride.
Everything else however, drags the game down into oblivion.
The game's combat has been stripped down from Fable II's system -- one of the few things Fable II actually got right is now downright horrible in Fable III. The game is ridiculously easy, and a baby could play it all the way through without dying more than a few times. The story hardly links in to Fable II's wonderful cliffhanger, which is tremendously disappointing. It simply introduces a completely new, clichéd element into the fray. While the voice-acting is remarkable, its effect is diminished by god-awful lip-syncing.
While the environments are beautiful, there is nothing to do in them. Treasure chests and the like are extremely scarce, and all the game does is throw amazingly annoying amounts of enemies at you (I'm talking like a dozen balverines within a 5-minute period) which are easy enough to cut down but just tedious to get by. The dog is completely boring in this; there is no emotional connection whatsoever, and no attempt is made to make this connection. Quests are boring, villager interaction has been completely botched (expressions are now only available through a randomised selection, the nice ones of which always start with dance -- so whether it's a flirtatious young lass or a burly guard I'm talking to, I can only waltz with them if I want to be nice), and the notion of touch is completely ludicrous.
Seeing a holding-hands animation does NOT make me care about this random character. Why am I being forced to escort a GROWN MAN by the hand through a cave, who is perfectly capable of sight and walking? It is the most lethargic effort at an innovative mechanic I have ever seen in a video game.
These aren't all the flaws of this game. Just the ones on the top of my head. There are more. And this game is the laziest, sloppiest, most boring piece of fecal matter I have ever been given by a modern developer. The game-play does not do the environment justice, and neither does the sloppy animations and lip-syncing do justice to the stellar voice-acting. This is the most disappointing, fundamentally flawed game of all time.
Peter Molyneux, I have lost all respect for you.