Fable the Lost Chapters brings a new shine to Fable, but its really like applying fresh paint to a used car.
For those who haven’t played the original game, Fable follows the life of a young boy, whose name you decide, from his tragic childhood to his becoming of one of the greatest heroes in the land of Albion. Through all this you will do side quests, gain skills, gain reputation amongst the masses (or notoriety), fight off undead and find out the truth about your family. The story of Fable is nothing too new or original, but it unfolds at whatever pace you choose since you can choose whether or not to take the quests that push the story forward. From the hub of your game, the Heroes Guild, you can level up your skills, take main or side quests or use the boasting platform just outside to increase the rewards you get from your quests. This game allows you to proceed at your own pace through the game, and if you would truly like to, you could wander the world and find other things to do with your time. Buy up homes, get married (repeatedly if you would like), sacrifice innocents to a dark god for his favor, open up all the Demon Doors you can get to or go hunting down all the silver keys and the silver chests they open. Fable is a beautifully rendered game, with a lush environment and beautifully detailed character models that populate this world. As you move through the cities, you will see a living populace that goes about its somewhat limited routines regardless of your presence, although later on they will either cheer your passing or cower in fear. You can even purchase custom titles that the populace will call you by. You start off known as “Chicken Chaser” but in time you can be known as Reaper, Paladin, Avatar or any of the thirty somewhat odd titles you choose from. Getting married extends this, as your spouse will often be very vocal in just how happy, or upset he or she is with you. This extends to the very tame sequences in which your darling spouse will ask you to hop into bed. They have some funny lines they deliver while the rest of the screen is blacked out, leaving it up to your dirty little imagination. Sadly enough though, the graphics and audio are Fables best points, which isn’t really a good thing considering that its an action RPG. This is especially aggravating considering the fact that all three combat systems have some very serious weaknesses in them making them either seriously unbalanced or frustratingly hard to actually use.
The melee combat is basically a cheap knock off of the Legend of Zelda games, using a lock on system, you can target an enemy and from there you do attacks that are basically dependant on what weapon you’re using. After landing a few successive hits, you gain the ability to do a flourish; this allows you to do a special attack that does more damage and can break an enemies defenses. As far as defense goes, you can either use your weapon to black, which leaves the enemy wide open to counter attack or you can roll in various directions which can help you escape from a tight spot, common when fighting multiple enemies. However, more often than not, you’re going to be swarmed by a large group of enemies and left constantly on the defense or wildly swinging to kill as many enemies as you can to cut down on the swarms. This makes for a fairly aggravating melee combat system.
Ranged attacks suffer far less than melee combat in this game, but it still suffers. The speed of the attacks are slow, understandably as you need to reload. But lets just hope that you don’t attempt to use the more powerful crossbow. Should you do this, you’re definitely going to be in trouble. The crossbow is so slow that you’re going to be able to fire one shot and then the enemies will cross the distance and get in your face, making it far less useful than the weaker bows. To make this worse, the only ranged attack artifact in the game that you can easily acquire is the crossbow. The artifact bow can only be gotten from sacrificing innocents at the shrine of the evil god, Skorm and even then, it’s still very difficult to actually get the bow reward. It seems somewhat spastic and requires a lot of reloading of the game to get it to actually decide to let you have the bow.
Magic in Fable, called Will, suffers from probably one of the biggest failings of all of the combat systems. The spells are so incredibly powerful that once you get three spells you’re basically unstoppable. As long as you run around with plenty of potions to replenish your will then you will be able to cut through most of the enemies. Even the bosses will be fairly easy to crush. Of course, near the beginning of the game you’re going to be very weak and easy to take out so it does provide something of a challenge to play as a pure magic user, using none of the other abilities (ranged and melee combat). However once you get going, you’re basically going to trounce everything and it really takes any challenge from the game.
While the ability to customize your characters appearance is incredibly detailed, this becomes fairly trivial as you gain in alignment points. Your character can do up his hair and facial hair in a variety of unique ways by collecting style cards. These allow you to visit a barber and change your appearance however you please. You can also find tattoo style cards, which allow you to attach tattoos predictably enough. These come in facial, chest, back, arm and leg tattoo’s, which lets you seriously, customize exactly how your character looks. These also affect how scary the people find you, your attractiveness and your alignment. In addition, your alignment changes how you appear as well. The more you lean towards good, your hair turns to near platinum blonde and you gain a halo as well as little butterflies flitting about you when you stand idle. As you lean towards evil, your eyes turn to black pits and your hair recedes drastically, replaced by demonic horns.
This is all well and good, but as your characters hair turns super pale with his alignment it becomes harder to see his hair and facial hair and as you go evil and your skin gets pale and sickly, its hard to see your tattoos. So it ends up making the customization seem trivial. Also, the game uses an arbitrary aging system, leaving you aging at the rate of one year per point you put into any of your skills. This leaves you reaching the maximum age of sixty-five ridiculously fast which makes no sense as the rest of the world doesn’t age in the least. This leaves you running around like an old man, whose skin is wrinkling, hair is going white and your tattoos fade with age. This only makes your appearance all the more irrelevant as its only going to fade and fade all too quickly. There is an exploit you can use, and this is a nice way around the limitation but it’s aggravating to need an age exploit to stay somewhat reasonably aged.
The things added into this partial expansion of Fable are so brief and quickly passed through that you will likely not even notice the majority of it. About five new missions that take place in the frozen north, a few magic weapons and suits of armor and a city that will buy your artifacts is just about all that’s been added in. Oh wait, I forgot about the pimp hat, fisherman hat and the chicken hat. If this doesn’t make you want this game, I can’t imagine what possibly will. How about the ability to get dance expressions, such as making your bulky hero in full plate mail do a little ballet pirouette or a little tap dancing? How about a chicken call? Its ridiculously silly and it adds nothing to the game.
The quests that you undertake are fairly interesting and will have you fighting some very tough enemies, but all in all they will be over before you really get too into it. The nice touch that is added into these quests though, is that they let you be as bad or as good as you want. For example, at one point you need to harvest the soul of the oldest hero in the land. You get the choice to go hunt down the soul of the old leader of the Heroes guild who still remains as an undead, or you can hunt down and slaughter the Guildmaster. There are a few of these choices to be made, and they are quite amusing, but at the same time they are too little to really matter much to any who have played through the regular game itself.
In the end, Fable the Lost Chapters is an adequate enough game that is definitely worth its budget price for a first time visitor to the land of Albion. However, if you have already played through Fable once before, then it would be a definite waste of time and money picking this one up. There’s simply not enough new material to make this worth a buy. If you’re truly desperate to see what new stuff this game adds in, then give it a rent. It should only take about six or seven hours to get through the entire game.
Score: 7/10