Fable: The Lost Chapters

The Good
The best part about this game was sadly the presentation. If you can stand the art direction (oversized gloves and charicatures), you'll enjoy the graphical quality of the game. Also, the sound is very pleasant. If the game had been more balanced, the character creation would have been a blast to play with too.

The Bad
Fable is a completely linear game that plays out the same way every time you play it. No matter what you accomplish in the game, it will still stay the same. No matter how you choose to create your character, the main story will stay exactly the same. The only thing you are able to affect are the amount of challenges (a really dumb idea) and sidequests you want to participate in.

Character creation starts out good, as it seemingly lets you create exactly the character you play, ie. you get experience points for the skills you use. Unfortunately, the game is extremely badly balanced, and once you get a specific 'skill' (won't mention it here as I feel it is a spoiler) you will never find any difficulty again.

The last thing I didn't like about this game are the confined maps. The maps are all very small, corridor-like and uninspired. This is hardly noticeable at first, because the graphics dazzles you, but after a while you'll notice that you practically never get lost. "Just follow the corridor in the forest, young padawan!".

The Bottom Line
Fable isn't really a true RPG. There are no dialogue options for starters, instead you communicate with body language. The exploration parts are there, but they are extremely weak as you're bound to go basically everywhere eventually anyhow because you have to (main quest). It plays out more like an action adventure (all combat is real time, twitch based) with RPG elements than anything I would refer to as a RPG.