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Jay's Game Reviews
#1
Jay
Jay
I always liked to do the occasional review on games I play that are review worthy. So let's give it a shot.
I'll start with Fable 3, PC version of course.
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I just beat Fable 3 over the course of the last week. Sadly as per the norm of the gaming industry you can finish it in less than 4 hours if you follow the main quest line and finish the game without doing any of the many sub-quests. There's no sandbox world and while the side-quests are many they mostly feel like more of a chore to do than they should have been.
Overall, I didn't like the game very much and honestly in many ways it’s exactly like Fable 2. To be frank, it felt like a Fable 2.5. I generally liked Fable 2 despite its failings, simply because it improved over its predecessor in many ways. It expanded your choices for customization, skills, the plot, everything was deeper, richer and had more thought put into it. The 3rd of the series expand it's a BIT more but in a lot of other ways just felt like lazy product.
To be honest Fable 3 might be one of the laziest games I’ve ever played. There are virtually no differences in gameplay or features from the last game, the designers not bothering to add new weapon types or spells. Not bothering to make any of the jobs different from each other, any of the people different from each other or even make the weapons different from each other. Baking pies is the same mechanic as forging iron or playing the lute and a nobleman is just as uninteresting in appearance and speech as a peasant.
Sure, I can collect 30+ weapons during one game sitting but they all work the SAME. Sure I can upgrade them but honestly... who wants to upgrade them when 1/2 of the weapons have side-missions to "make 5 people love you". Do you know how inane that is? How many stupid side quests I'll have to take on to upgrade all my weapons? Some of easily done with "kill 150 enemies at night"... but "have an orgy with 4 people".... really? REALLY?
NPC creation is a joke and I'll discuss that even more further later when I discuss my family... but honestly, all the NPCs were ugly looking, making wife selection difficult in itself (no Lady Grey
) and what was worse is that the "random creation generator" didn't take into consideration of name selection. The end result? I'd end up with 3 Katy the Villagers, who looks ALL completely the same walking beside eachother in Bowerstone Market. Lazy Lazy Lazy....
Day/Night doesn't feel like Day/Night. In the previous version of the games, you felt like you were living in a real world, where the night would come in, the guards will double their number for duty, people will go to sleep, go home and hang out, or go to the tavern for some drinks. However, time passes by so quickly that you don't see this and the NPCs are continually and of course failing to achieve anything during nights. If you sat back idle in town and watched NPCs you'll see them running about then run back to the shop, literally upable to cope with the day/night mechanics. Lazy Lazy Lazy....
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
Storyline wise I have no problem with the first part of the game. Gathering allies across a nation by doing various quests to win their favor then overthrow the king. I do have an issue where there's little to no challenge in doing this as well as once again a final battle while not as ridiculous as press a button to win as it was in Fable 2, they did it again and gave me a final battle that was settled within 10 seconds.... what happened to the epic fights such as those against Jack of Blades? Lazy Lazy Lazy...
I don't like how things push you forward once you become king. As it turns out, my brother was such a dick to prepare for an incoming invasion of evil and I would have to now decide whether or not to please the people at the risk of their safety or become hated but fend off their impending doom.
The way to do this was to fill the kingdom’s treasure with gold and I needed $6.5M to save them all and making $100,000 every five minutes of gameplay (as I owned almost every store and piece of property in the country) I thought I had a pretty reasonable shot with 365 days on the clock.
WRONG.
The second half of the game is not a half at all, it was merely an extra hour or so, where each day you would wake up, wander over to your throne room and make some decision whether or not to build an orphanage or a whore house (not worth it unless you plan to max out your favorite weapon that needs ORGY of 4 and more). One decision always made the people happy but cost you money and the other would make them boo you in the streets but the literal mountain of gold in your treasury would grow. (there is a joy to be had to run around in circles on top of your treasure in the treasury room)
For the first few days, I always did the nice thing, thinking by the time the invasions rolled around I would have enough coin to finance the entire war myself and as proud owner of every building in Albion, I figured that was a reasonable goal.
After my first day of rule, there were 360 days left. After my next, 290, then 220 and all of a sudden 120. This wasn’t a year at all! After I finished the last item on each daily list, I would automatically be teleported into the future by an uncertain amount of days. I stopped the main quest and ran about town and left the game on while I watched Game of Thrones on TV so I amassed money, knowing the game was going to fuck me over somehow. . . I was never sure what was ahead, so how would I know if I had enough time to make the financial goal?
Does 122 days left sound like the last day of something to you? But it was, and after I finished one last arbitrary quest, I was thrust into the thick of the invasion, with no way to turn back, or earn more cash or upgrades. Thank god I used my delay tactic for I amassed 8 million with 3-4 hours of idle time.
Combat wise I’ve given Fable a free pass on this for a while now but it’s gotten to the point where something must be done. This game’s combat system is unreasonably unbalanced and makes the entire game practically a joke. Your sword is more or less useless. If you want to take on a group with your melee weapon, you’ll have to block, lunge, parry, dodge, charge attack and your opponents will block half your attacks. And that’s if there’s only one of them. Being surrounded by a crowd makes sword fighting even more unbearable, because after all, why would you want to swing a sword, when you can roll away and blast everyone with a rifle? The gun is the far easier alternative to the sword, as no enemy in the game can effectively block bullets. There’s a reason swordplay in combat went out the window once gunpowder was invented.
But why shoot a gun when you can just explode everyone onscreen with magic? Yes, magic is still massively overpowered and the charged lightning area of effect B attack is the key to winning any battle. Now with the power to combine spells, I can electrocute AND burn my enemies to ash. And no mana potions to keep this in check? Absolutely inane and lazy.
Simply put, combat is an embarrassment and mind-numbing easy.
Navigation in this game is terrible. Yes, the brightly lit breadcrumb trail taking you to your next destination is still in place though I have had the game glitch several times where the trail wouldn’t appear at all, or would flutter in and out like the magic dust had a fuse that needed to be changed. Sometimes pointing me to something completely wrong. The system needs some change.
One thing that keeps bothering me incredibly since Fable 2 is the interaction with any NPC have to have anything meaningful to say. Lazy programming simply gives you XP (more than actual combat in fact) for performing “expressions” now. What gets me is that these expressions correspond to the person you’re talking to to gain favor. Sure, maybe I’ll seduce Mary the Bartender with a few sexy salsa dance moves but I’d rather not to do the same to Sam the Blacksmith to haggle the price of his weapons.
This is the exact opposite of say, Mass Effect where practically every person you see has something worth hearing. Could you see Commander Shepard walking up to the Asari consort and flapping his arms like a chicken so she likes him enough to give him some meat pie? I understand it’s a different kind of game but jesus christ, put some effort.
And why not pick another option? Because I can’t due to lazy programming because usually only two expression options appear onscreen at a time and my other choice is to dance like a chicken or to fart in their faces.
What really annoyed me most of the game is that when I finally found someone to marry (who happened to be nature loving woman from Driftwood, probably the best concept they had in the game) my character quickly became a father. It was actually kind of a magical moment. A real nice moment with great music. I had a precious little infant girl I custom named Layla and I would sing to her and be a good dad and hugged my virtual wife in our wooden hamlet home on an island in Driftwood. It was cool. I liked it.
I progress in a few side quests and what did I find when I returned? My little daughter had grown into a seven year old BLACK GIRL. Look, I’m not trying to be racist here at all, I’m merely pointing out the supreme laziness that accompanies something like this happening. Though as far as I can tell, you can only be a white hero and the girl’s mother is most definitely white as well. How did this happen? Clearly rather than take the five minutes necessary to write code that factors the parents’ race in, there’s just a completely random child generator system in place that can produce a kid of any kind of appearance, regardless of pesky things like genetics. Absolutely pure laziness. It completely enraged me and in the end gave me the idea to write this review.
While there are a lot of bad things going for this game, the comedy in this game is pretty solid and a couple of side-missions are really great. Getting Driftwood up and going was very rewarding for me as well as the "DM Game Table" with plenty of witty dialogue that painted a smile on my face for an hour. Walter was an enjoyable companion and I felt for him later on in the game... BALLS.
Is the game worth a buy on PC? Absolutely not but maybe a Steam special during Xmas putting it under the 10$ range will be good enough for a buy.
I'll start with Fable 3, PC version of course.
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I just beat Fable 3 over the course of the last week. Sadly as per the norm of the gaming industry you can finish it in less than 4 hours if you follow the main quest line and finish the game without doing any of the many sub-quests. There's no sandbox world and while the side-quests are many they mostly feel like more of a chore to do than they should have been.
Overall, I didn't like the game very much and honestly in many ways it’s exactly like Fable 2. To be frank, it felt like a Fable 2.5. I generally liked Fable 2 despite its failings, simply because it improved over its predecessor in many ways. It expanded your choices for customization, skills, the plot, everything was deeper, richer and had more thought put into it. The 3rd of the series expand it's a BIT more but in a lot of other ways just felt like lazy product.
To be honest Fable 3 might be one of the laziest games I’ve ever played. There are virtually no differences in gameplay or features from the last game, the designers not bothering to add new weapon types or spells. Not bothering to make any of the jobs different from each other, any of the people different from each other or even make the weapons different from each other. Baking pies is the same mechanic as forging iron or playing the lute and a nobleman is just as uninteresting in appearance and speech as a peasant.
Sure, I can collect 30+ weapons during one game sitting but they all work the SAME. Sure I can upgrade them but honestly... who wants to upgrade them when 1/2 of the weapons have side-missions to "make 5 people love you". Do you know how inane that is? How many stupid side quests I'll have to take on to upgrade all my weapons? Some of easily done with "kill 150 enemies at night"... but "have an orgy with 4 people".... really? REALLY?
NPC creation is a joke and I'll discuss that even more further later when I discuss my family... but honestly, all the NPCs were ugly looking, making wife selection difficult in itself (no Lady Grey
) and what was worse is that the "random creation generator" didn't take into consideration of name selection. The end result? I'd end up with 3 Katy the Villagers, who looks ALL completely the same walking beside eachother in Bowerstone Market. Lazy Lazy Lazy....Day/Night doesn't feel like Day/Night. In the previous version of the games, you felt like you were living in a real world, where the night would come in, the guards will double their number for duty, people will go to sleep, go home and hang out, or go to the tavern for some drinks. However, time passes by so quickly that you don't see this and the NPCs are continually and of course failing to achieve anything during nights. If you sat back idle in town and watched NPCs you'll see them running about then run back to the shop, literally upable to cope with the day/night mechanics. Lazy Lazy Lazy....
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
Storyline wise I have no problem with the first part of the game. Gathering allies across a nation by doing various quests to win their favor then overthrow the king. I do have an issue where there's little to no challenge in doing this as well as once again a final battle while not as ridiculous as press a button to win as it was in Fable 2, they did it again and gave me a final battle that was settled within 10 seconds.... what happened to the epic fights such as those against Jack of Blades? Lazy Lazy Lazy...
I don't like how things push you forward once you become king. As it turns out, my brother was such a dick to prepare for an incoming invasion of evil and I would have to now decide whether or not to please the people at the risk of their safety or become hated but fend off their impending doom.
The way to do this was to fill the kingdom’s treasure with gold and I needed $6.5M to save them all and making $100,000 every five minutes of gameplay (as I owned almost every store and piece of property in the country) I thought I had a pretty reasonable shot with 365 days on the clock.
WRONG.
The second half of the game is not a half at all, it was merely an extra hour or so, where each day you would wake up, wander over to your throne room and make some decision whether or not to build an orphanage or a whore house (not worth it unless you plan to max out your favorite weapon that needs ORGY of 4 and more). One decision always made the people happy but cost you money and the other would make them boo you in the streets but the literal mountain of gold in your treasury would grow. (there is a joy to be had to run around in circles on top of your treasure in the treasury room)
For the first few days, I always did the nice thing, thinking by the time the invasions rolled around I would have enough coin to finance the entire war myself and as proud owner of every building in Albion, I figured that was a reasonable goal.
After my first day of rule, there were 360 days left. After my next, 290, then 220 and all of a sudden 120. This wasn’t a year at all! After I finished the last item on each daily list, I would automatically be teleported into the future by an uncertain amount of days. I stopped the main quest and ran about town and left the game on while I watched Game of Thrones on TV so I amassed money, knowing the game was going to fuck me over somehow. . . I was never sure what was ahead, so how would I know if I had enough time to make the financial goal?
Does 122 days left sound like the last day of something to you? But it was, and after I finished one last arbitrary quest, I was thrust into the thick of the invasion, with no way to turn back, or earn more cash or upgrades. Thank god I used my delay tactic for I amassed 8 million with 3-4 hours of idle time.
Combat wise I’ve given Fable a free pass on this for a while now but it’s gotten to the point where something must be done. This game’s combat system is unreasonably unbalanced and makes the entire game practically a joke. Your sword is more or less useless. If you want to take on a group with your melee weapon, you’ll have to block, lunge, parry, dodge, charge attack and your opponents will block half your attacks. And that’s if there’s only one of them. Being surrounded by a crowd makes sword fighting even more unbearable, because after all, why would you want to swing a sword, when you can roll away and blast everyone with a rifle? The gun is the far easier alternative to the sword, as no enemy in the game can effectively block bullets. There’s a reason swordplay in combat went out the window once gunpowder was invented.
But why shoot a gun when you can just explode everyone onscreen with magic? Yes, magic is still massively overpowered and the charged lightning area of effect B attack is the key to winning any battle. Now with the power to combine spells, I can electrocute AND burn my enemies to ash. And no mana potions to keep this in check? Absolutely inane and lazy.
Simply put, combat is an embarrassment and mind-numbing easy.
Navigation in this game is terrible. Yes, the brightly lit breadcrumb trail taking you to your next destination is still in place though I have had the game glitch several times where the trail wouldn’t appear at all, or would flutter in and out like the magic dust had a fuse that needed to be changed. Sometimes pointing me to something completely wrong. The system needs some change.
One thing that keeps bothering me incredibly since Fable 2 is the interaction with any NPC have to have anything meaningful to say. Lazy programming simply gives you XP (more than actual combat in fact) for performing “expressions” now. What gets me is that these expressions correspond to the person you’re talking to to gain favor. Sure, maybe I’ll seduce Mary the Bartender with a few sexy salsa dance moves but I’d rather not to do the same to Sam the Blacksmith to haggle the price of his weapons.
This is the exact opposite of say, Mass Effect where practically every person you see has something worth hearing. Could you see Commander Shepard walking up to the Asari consort and flapping his arms like a chicken so she likes him enough to give him some meat pie? I understand it’s a different kind of game but jesus christ, put some effort.
And why not pick another option? Because I can’t due to lazy programming because usually only two expression options appear onscreen at a time and my other choice is to dance like a chicken or to fart in their faces.
What really annoyed me most of the game is that when I finally found someone to marry (who happened to be nature loving woman from Driftwood, probably the best concept they had in the game) my character quickly became a father. It was actually kind of a magical moment. A real nice moment with great music. I had a precious little infant girl I custom named Layla and I would sing to her and be a good dad and hugged my virtual wife in our wooden hamlet home on an island in Driftwood. It was cool. I liked it.
I progress in a few side quests and what did I find when I returned? My little daughter had grown into a seven year old BLACK GIRL. Look, I’m not trying to be racist here at all, I’m merely pointing out the supreme laziness that accompanies something like this happening. Though as far as I can tell, you can only be a white hero and the girl’s mother is most definitely white as well. How did this happen? Clearly rather than take the five minutes necessary to write code that factors the parents’ race in, there’s just a completely random child generator system in place that can produce a kid of any kind of appearance, regardless of pesky things like genetics. Absolutely pure laziness. It completely enraged me and in the end gave me the idea to write this review.
While there are a lot of bad things going for this game, the comedy in this game is pretty solid and a couple of side-missions are really great. Getting Driftwood up and going was very rewarding for me as well as the "DM Game Table" with plenty of witty dialogue that painted a smile on my face for an hour. Walter was an enjoyable companion and I felt for him later on in the game... BALLS.
Is the game worth a buy on PC? Absolutely not but maybe a Steam special during Xmas putting it under the 10$ range will be good enough for a buy.
#2
Hailey Knight
Hailey Knight
Maybe it's just not your kid.
#3
Jay
Jay