Under-developed and over-hyped, Fable 3 is good for one shallow play through and padding your gamerscore. Nothing more.
Fable 3 is a continuation of the series where you are the Hero's son or daughter from the last game. Your elder brother Logan is the despotic ruler of Albion and it's your job to overthrow him and then lead the kingdom against a faceless and generic army of darkness.
At first you live the life of royalty in the castle but are soon kicked to the curb as you take on the role of Hero and revolutionary. You must gain support of the various followers in the realm to have a force strong enough to defeat your brother and take your place on the throne.
During your adventure you have the support of a wide variety of characters, including Sir Walter, Jasper your Butler who takes care of your sanctuary (think of it as your pause screen/inventory where your clothes, weapons and other features are housed), and your faithful dog.
For a game that allows you to rule the lands, own shops, raise a family, meet your subjects and engage in various forms of combat, only a few of these actions are necessary and are performed regularly.
First, combat is simply done by choosing to attack with Melee, Magic or Ranged combat, and ranged and magic are so overpowered compared to melee it's not funny. Melee weapons are constantly blocked and countered where magic is unblockable as is gunplay. Endgame ranged weaponry makes you essentially powerful enough that two or three shots will kill almost any enemy, including "bosses" (which essentially don't exist for the most part).
Here's an example of combat. Thugs engage you. You pull out your flintlock and blast them. A few die, some get close, you roll, you blast a few more and a cool slowed down bullet time Matrix effect flourish finish occurs. The end. The only time you are ever in real danger is when you are surrounded by fast moving enemies such as the balverines (Werewolves). Even then, it is highly doubtful you will fall in combat once throughout the game seeing as the number of healing potions you acquire throughout the game are near limitless and trivialize damage received.
Outside of combat, the game is very light on the whole puzzle solving/using your brain part of gameplay. I think the first dungeon explained something about switches which are activated by either magic or guns and I'm pretty sure I never saw them again throughout the whole story.
To "level up" you acquire guild seals which are gained through combat, completing missions and interacting with the populace. Missions are the best bet for large quantities and combat simply doesn't give many guild seals throughout the game (I bet if I added up my 1500+ kills throughout the game, I might have totaled 10% of my total guild seals earned). Once exhausted through your quest list, your only option is gaining followers by interacting with the populace via good or bad interactions, which in theory are supposed to be randomized generally boil down to dancing, pat a cake or farting on villagers. Once you reach a tier of a given friendship level you have to undertake a tedious fetch quest (which is ironically the title of that quest in your quest list) to move to the next level. Sadly, this is the only way to progress in certain parts of the game and is part of the way to garner all possible achievements (namely maxxing out your character's stats and abilities).
Owning houses, shops and other locations provides income, which is necessary for defense of your kingdom at the end portion, and is a tedious time sink which requires you to manually repair houses before they can get rent money. Similarly, shops while not requiring upkeep take a lot of money to buy in the first place and to get money (I'm talking on the order of 10 million or more) you need to be a good ruler at the end of the game you have to simply crank up the fees to their highest, suffer your lack of good standing with the people and make that money.
It's sad, helping people in this game requires tough choices and even if you do everything bad in order to save your kingdom by acquiring a good army and lots of funds, you still will not have enough money to save everyone.
Let's just say that to get enough money to be the perfect hero (which I know most people like taking this path) it doesn't require much heroism, but a lot of buying property, and letting your Xbox run (about 24 hours straight with all property bought) will be sufficient. There are simply not enough ways to raise funds outside of sitting and waiting. A few quests offer half a million gold reward, but that is a drop in the hat in the grand scheme of how much money is needed to be good.
On the other side of the coin, the game sort of shoehorns you into being good, I think perhaps there are two or three small quests that could be categorized as the "evil" ruler path while the vast majority are good in nature. You have to be good through the story, although you can be bad and tyrannical in the end game during your period of rule.
You can earn money through jobs, but to make any real money, it takes a long time to get to the point you can purchase the skills required to be a master pie maker or lute player. Additionally, it takes a long time and is very very VERY tedious. Example.
Press X,X,X,A,X,A,A. Switch those up. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum.
Cooperative gameplay is nice, considering you can be your own hero rather than some nameless henchman like in Fable 2, but it's more of the same droll and montononous combat shared with a friend. Misery does love company.
Basically the gameplay is repetetive and simplistic. Period the end.
Extra bits like marriage, sex, family, interior decorating, blah blah blah are quite nice and all but are entirely unnecessary and don't meaningfully contribute to your character's stats or the story in the least. Contracting STDs doesn't actually do anything, and you probably won't be sitting around decorating the houses you own.
The game contains many loading screens due to the constant need to run between zones on the number of fetch missions and quests. Basically it interrupts the whole flow of the game and on more than one occasion, I've had a few game freezes.
Graphically the game is pretty good with lots of diverse locales and character models, including a few dozen sets of clothes with a vast array of possible permutations based on tops, bottoms, shoes, gloves, hats, etc. And each piece can be dyed, so customizing your hero is quite easy. Sets of clothing can be saved and restored easily through mannequins.
The voice acting is excellent, especially John Cleese's Jasper character and Reaver's hoity toity aristocratic Queen's English accent is hilariously droll and ironic. The gnomes are experts at annoying and taunting your character and are a pleasure to blast as part of an ongoing quest in the game.
The animations are top notch, although the game has weird clipping issues and the game has a weird "cloudy" or blurry effect which I believe is part of the game's rendering engine.
I was pleased enough to complete the game, but it didn't leave me any lasting impression enough to warrant a replay or anything worthy of mention here in the review. Sure dry humor, an interesting premise and decent graphics carry a game so far, but the repetition the repetition the repetition... ahem... I was stuck in a rut there, sort of like Fable's gameplay.
Pros :
+ Great graphics and customizability of your avatar
+ Hilarious in a dry British sort of way
+ Excellent voice acting and sounds
+ Lots of stuff to do...
Cons :
- ... most of that stuff is extraneous and has no impact on anything in terms of story progression or character growth
- VERY repetitive and simplified gameplay
- No true bosses
- Very little puzzles/diversity in gameplay, go here, kill this, return this item.
- Game shoehorns your moral choices generally towards the good side, yet makes it incredibly hard (and by hard I mean boring and repetitive) to pursue that path of rule.