I played both Fable and Fable II, and while neither was my favorite game ever I enjoyed playing through them. Fable III started off pretty similarly but the longer I played the more thing I found myself annoyed with. You play as the Prince of Albion. You are the son of the character you played in Fable II, and your older brother is currently king. The problem is your brother is a real jerk and forces you to decide between having you girlfriend or innocent people executed. At this point your servant and one of your Dad’s loyal friends leave the castle with you to start a rebellion against the king.  What I don’t get is why I’d ever leave the castle. The game constantly lets you pick between being good and evil, but the actual events are very scripted. Instead of spending all this time raising up a rebellion why can’t I sneak into my brothers room in his sleep and just assassinate him.  Saves everyone a lot of time and trouble.  Instead you play through a pretty generic story where you have to become friends with all of the King’s enemies to form a rebellion strong enough to beat him.

Even if I ignore the fact the story was stupid there are a lot of other things that are just lame.

Combat – You have a melee weapon, a gun and your magic abilities available for the combat on Fable III. Each of these is mapped to a button.  Hit it to attack or hold it down to charge it up. It very quickly gets repetitive as there is no real strategy or combos to the combat.  Just keep bashing your preferred button and rolling out of the way of the enemy attacks. Even more annoying is that you have to be fairly close to enemies to be able to target them with your gun or magic attacks.  If I see an enemy I should be able to target them, but not in Fable III. Why bother having ranged attacks it you have to be so close to the enemies to use them? I might as well just run over and hit them at that point.

Pacing & Travel– The story’s pacing is all over the place. Some parts take forever and others go too quickly. Most of the time I found it too slow. Making it worse is that your walking speed is pretty slow. They give you a “run” button if you hold down A, but it is not really much faster than just walking. This would not be so frustrating if the Fast Travel system did not suck so bad.  At any time you can go to the map and fast travel to a location near your current quest’s location.  Only most of the time the fast travel just drops you at the far edge of an area and you still have to run just about as far as you did before you fast traveled, and in some cases even further than if you have not used Fast Travel.

Repetition – A lot of the side quests are the exact same thing but for a new person. Go deliver a message.  Go kill all these enemies.  Escort me across the world (while holding hands). You can skip most of the side-quests if you want but then you will not get anywhere near all of your character upgrades unlocked. The interactions you have with all the NPCs in the world are also exactly the same each time.  I mean how many times an I really going to dance or hug a random stranger?

Money – Why is it the prince is flat broke? I mean why couldn’t I take any gold with me when I left the castle?  Can I take the money off the dead bodies of the enemies I kill?  Oh,they are all broke too.  Great I guess I work a job that is basically a 5 step quick time event until I have enough cash to buy some real estate.  Then use the rent money I make to buy more properties until I have all of them.  Yeah, just like Fable II until you about half the country you are going to be broke all the time. Then you have a good amount of rent money to cover buying potions, weapons and outfits. Assuming you remember to go back through all your rental properties every hour or so and repair them – one at a time. If you want me to pay for the upkeep and repair on all the properties that is fine, but at least let me do them all at once instead of having to do each one individually. This is not fun and is possibly the worst idea ever.

Achievements – First, there are a ton of lame collection achievements that will probably require you to use a guide to find them all. I don’t kind if there is one, maybe even 2, collection style achievements, but there are 6 or 7 in Fable III and none of them are fun to try and get.  Worse than that depending on the choices you make in the main story you can completely lock yourself out of certain areas of the world so that you then can’t go to them to get the items you need to collect.

I would highly recommend avoiding Fable III. From the story to the game play mechanics everything about it is frustrating, annoying or poorly designed.