Difficulty:

Very Easy

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Immersive"

Controls: PC controls worked fine. I also played with a USB controller for about 2 hours for comparison purposes and found that it was neither superior nor inferior, just different and up to personal preference; Standard WASD for movement and mouse for attacks, parry and camera angle. You can remap 9 keys (but the movement keys are not among them) and adjust mouse sensitivity. If anything, the WASD keys were slightly oversensitive, but this has its advantages (e.g. you'd be hard pressed to score less than 2,200+ in the mortar minigame as you can cover the map faster than even your NPC spotter can call it).

Some console conventions, such as having to go to a save room, were mildly annoying but well worked within the context of the game. For FPS/3PS PC players used to hot keying a myriad of weapons for quick switches having to "warp" back to the sanctuary every time can get a bit tedious. This is exacerbated by the different weapons upgrade requirements. If you plan to upgrade only a couple of your favorite weapons, this is not an issue. However, if you are a bit of a completionist with regards to weapons upgrades (I managed 37 upgrades in one run) you may find yourself having to warp back and forth 5-6 times per zone. E.g. I'd, say, have a sword that requires me to kill 100 humans with flourishes and a pistol that requires 150 daytime men kills for a merc encounter for example, then take 10 steps further on and run into hobbes and have to warp back to the sanctuary to switch to a hammer that requires killing short monsters and a rifle that requires killing ugly creatures. Past this another 10 steps and I encounter balverines so it's back to the sanctuary again for another loadout etc.

Bugs: None encountered. No file corruption, no crashes to desktops, no freezes encountered in two complete runs. Got stuck in the trunk of a tree once after vaulting from a ledge in Silverpines but this is easily solved by fast travelling out and back again. Some well documented odd coding choices from the console version remains (e.g. I married a white childhood sweetheart and got a black baby and married a black aristocrat in Millfields and got a white baby due to the random NPC generator).

Load times: Short and few and far between. Fable is also one of the few games of this type where you can enter almost every building/house/factory in a given zone without a separate load screen.

Graphics: At 1920x1080, everything on max except shadows and water effects which were set on high, the games looks amazing. (Sidenote: The category you always want to maximize first as a PC gamer, especially if you play MMO PvP but also for any game that allows it, is the draw distance, it makes a huge difference.) No framerate glitches/drops were encountered that was noticeable to the naked eye while playing (on a high-end machine). But more so than textures or polygon counts, I've always loved the art-direction/style of the Fable franchise since the first installment. Rather than going for a direct 'realism' style adopted by some developers (with varying degrees of success) or the anime style adopted by some Japanese/Korean games, fable is more akin to Pixar production. If you enjoy that style, you will love Fable's visuals.

Combat gameplay: Although it is supposed to be harder than the console version, it is still very easy. Even in the new veteran mode, I finished the game having downed only a single health potion (and never had to use a summon creature or slow time pot even once). This was a bit of a letdown, up to and including the final boss fight which was way easy. I feel that combat has regressed with each iteration of the franchise.

My main gripe is the lack of a mini(radar) map/compass or even a "you are here" indicator. This is actually made worse by a woefully simplified and erroneous zoom map you can access from a table in you sanctuary. You can follow a "glowing breadcrumb trail" to your next point in a quest, but for those that like to explore like myself, this lack alone knocks a half-point off my score by itself. Each area is well designed, which makes it a shame that they make independent navigation such a chore, at least in the early stages until you get familiar with each zone. I must have spent half-an-hour trying to find the third or three cave entrances in one of the very first maps you have access to (Mistpeak).

General Game Review (non-platform specific):
Fable is unique among RPGs in many ways. If you "get it" you can really enjoy this game. If you are an RPG traditionalist, you may not. There are no stats like dexterity or intelligence to mess around with nor experience points or level ups (you improve your character via guild seal accumulation). There is no traditional inventory screen per se, nor armor (but plenty of clothes, hairstyles, tattoos, dyes etc. which are purely cosmetic), there is practically no HUD (e.g. you do not have a health bar, nor do you your enemies, no mana pool, no ammo stock).

You can, however, interact with and change the virtual world in more ways than any another RPG that claims "your choices make a difference" on the box, but really don't. Every NPC can be interacted with and change their outlook toward you. Want to go further and shape the entire population so that it contains only scared old men or flirty young girls according to your whim? That's possible too, I did it to Brightwall with precisely 157 NPC kills. There's more sandbox room in this game than even Fallout3/NV, if you push it. Practically every house or business can be bought or sold or lived in or rented out. You can turn an idyllic lakeside suburb into an open pit mine. It's the only game I know where you can transplant NPCs zone to zone. Transport a bunch of aristocrats from Millfields to Bowerstone Industrial, for example and when you come back later you find that they are hanging out downing tankards in the local pub wondering how the heck they ended up there. Transport half a dozen thugs from the merc camp to Old Quarter and you will see them accosting the locals and making a nuisance of themselves.

Partially as a result, the Fable games have been the only RPGs where my avatar has really felt that he was at home. Having wives and/or kids and/or good friends around in various towns, however perfunctory the mechanics may or may not be also contribute. Albion is home. I stress this because, IMO, other RPGs have singularly failed to give me this impression. Now in many RPGs, you are supposed to be an adventurer in a strange land so this doesn't matter, but even in DA:O where they tried hard to do this with the origin stories, I really felt at most, like an interested tourist. Meanwhile, in others like the recently released DS3, for example, I couldn't care less about the 10th legion nor can even recall what the name of the country was having finished it less than a month ago. This all goes to immersion, and for me, Fable tops the RPG genre in this category.

Voice acting: Uniformly excellent. Superior even to Bioware's games IMHO. Bernard Hill (the guy who played King Theoden in the LoTR movies) performance as Sir Walter during the Shadelight level in particular was outstanding.

This is a fun and entertaining game that is unique in many ways, especially if you want to push the envelope. I enjoyed it immensely.