It’s not uncommon that a sequel misses the various design points that made its predecessor so successful. Case in point: how Dead Space 2 designed its monsters versus the first game. Fable 3 has to be the first time that I’ve seen anyone screw up so badly that the game isn’t even worth playing.

That’s right, don’t bother. Just play Fable 2 or Fable: The Lost Chapters instead. Both of those games are good and fun. Fable 3 is just a waste of time.

There’s so much wrong with this game that it’s hard to pick a starting point. From the story to the gameplay everything has been tainted and sundered until anything that made the previous games fun has been cast aside or destroyed.

Well, that’s not completely true. Side quests are still enjoyable. Wandering the world finding snarky gnome statues, ancient tomes and silver keys is still a blast. The world of Albion is perhaps more beautiful than ever with plenty of crevices to drop into and explore. This is the part of Fable 3 that continues to be a joy, and it has always been the one highlight of the previous two entries.

Everything else, more or less, still fun though. It was annoying in Fable 2 that civilians followed you everywhere you went, but interacting with them was still amusing.

I think that’s the most noticeable aspect of gameplay that has been ruined, honestly. You no longer choose which expression you want outside of “Good” or “Bad”. If the game wants you to dance, you dance. If the game wants you to give someone the raspberry, that’s what you give them. There’s no more freedom in choice, which is supposed to be the big selling point of the franchise. Sure, it only came about that you were Light Side or Dark Side with no chance of neutrality, but at least there was an illusion of freedom.

There’s no more interacting with a mass of villagers, either. The player can only interact with them one-at-a-time. Technically this isn’t so bad, as it prevents players from mass-bombing a village with their expressions, one of the reasons players got so many followers to begin with. Unfortunately one of the best ways to gain “Guild Seals”, the new form of experience points, is to make friends with villagers.

No lie, the fastest way to “level up” in this game isn’t combat or questing, but to go to each villager one by one and interact with them. So if the player wants to unlock every ability they have to do one of the most boring and worst kinds of grinds imaginable. There’s no option for expressions used, and there’s no way to make friends with multiple villagers at once. The best way to level up is a boring slog through the entire population of Albion.

Romancing a character has become more complicated as well. I applaud Peter Molyneux for wanting to make love a bit more interesting, but the execution is the equivalent of making a game of mowing the lawn by forcing a player to go to the store to buy the mower first. After interacting enough with a character they’ll demand you go on an arbitrary fetch quest for them. Once you’ve returned you then have to interact with them enough that they force you to take them to some romantic location outside of town. Then you can finally propose.

Love is a chore in Fable 3, and makes it obvious that the new hand-holding game mechanic that was supposed to be “so amazing” was added in to make NPC’s less annoying. Escort quests are now tolerable, in other words.

Villagers may be the worst offender, but the simplification of interaction carries over through the other aspects of the game. Magic spells have been reduced to just six. The concept of combining two of them seems lovely until you realize you’re just casting the same two spells at once. With the exception of mixing fire and a whirlwind together, there is no combination of spells that produces new effects. Just two spells cast at the same time.

There is no more player death. You lose some of your Guild Seals progress and get a scar, then are brought right back into the fight. Even if there were a risk of death the game would be painfully easy.

Leveling up and maxing out your character was supposed to be harder in the game, yet by time you’ve beaten it you’ve no way to buy all the abilities. That is, unless you didn’t purchase upgrades throughout. See, if you purchase, say, the level 3 melee ability before purchasing the level 1 or 2, then those will be unlocked for free. But in order to reach that point you have to be playing the game with the basic melee skill. That, or you resort to just magic and range, which is impossible to do since each is time consuming and doesn’t hit foes nearly enough. So the most effective way to level up is to focus on the monotonous melee combat and completely ignore the other abilities.

The problem with the previous Fable games was that it was too easy to maximize all player abilities without playing everything in the game. Fable 3 loses spells and makes it nearly impossible to maximize abilities after playing every quest in the game. The player is sabotaged to be weaker, basically.

The only real improvement to the game was managing real estate. You can load up the map and purchase, repair and modify the rent/prices of any building from there. Of course, considering how often you have to repair it would’ve been nice if the game included some additional options. Press a button for “repair all” from the main map, or enter a specific area’s map and “repair all” from there. Would have sped the process up even further.

This map, of course, is located in the “new and improved” 3D menu, which is supposed to be an improvement over the previous menu that had trouble running. I always found it amusing that this would be Lionhead’s choice. Not to remove all the fancy graphics in the 2D menu, or to have it always loaded in the background. Which is clearly the choice with the 3D menu. It loads instantly, meaning it must be in memory the whole time.

Most indicative of this fact is how slowly the rest of the game runs. Every other environment runs at such poor frame rates, even worse than the first game, without having seen much of a graphical improvement. The best reason I could possibly think is that there’s a set of 3D rooms stored in memory so that the “new pause menu” can load up quickly. In the end, I would have much preferred a well designed and smoothly running 2D menu. It’s not hard, after all. Didn’t they notice how much better Microsoft’s dashboard loaded and ran once they stopped using so many images?

Perhaps worst of all, however, is how this game ends. For the first time in my life I wanted to be evil in a game. I never really found being evil amusing, particularly because most games don’t have good options. It’s more like be a morally grounded character, or be a dick that leaves flaming dog poop on your neighbor’s porch. Fable tends to lean closer to Lawful Stupid or Chaotic Douchebag, but the darker spectrum is just so much more tempting this time around.

The first half of the game’s story assumes you’re a good guy. It is clear in how all of the characters interact with you. They pin all of their hopes and dreams in you being a better king than your brother, and as you’re forced to help all of them you are also made to promise to help them after you are king. Never is the player given the option to say “I’m not sure I can make that promise”, or even to say “No”. They must accept so that Peter Molyneux’s story can be told.

It isn’t until the player becomes king themselves that they can “be evil”, though being evil is actually being good. See, it turns out your brother wasn’t a tyrant, he was just trying to make sure the kingdom could afford the military might to defend against some big evil coming in a year.

For the next 365 days (sort of (more like five or six quests before the final attack)) you get to sit on your throne and make decrees that will affect Albion’s defenses. Peter Molyneux’s goal was to reveal that politics weren’t as easy as they look, and some promises have to be broken for the greater good, even if it makes you look like a jerk.

In reality, it makes it look as if the only way to make everyone happy is to be a republican. The only way to make enough good decisions to not be a tyrant is to collect all that money from your real estate and shove it into the government’s treasury. So you have to be a successful businessman that uses their own money to save the world.

Once again, Peter Molyneux forces extremes. All the demands of the “good people” of Albion make me hate them, and I end up wanting them all to die anyway.

Then, even if you can save everyone, the game comes down to one final conflict that builds up to an easy fight. The final boss is just a regular guy, and there’s only one phase. Defeating him somehow defeats everyone, and then the game is over. There were longer and harder fights against Balvarines in earlier sections of the game than the final conflict.

There was no greater hollow feeling than beating this game. There was no joy or happiness. In fact, there was only relief that I had finally finished it.

Normally, if there was anything I enjoyed in a game I’d label it a rental. Sometimes it’s a matter of taste. But there really is no reason to play Fable 3, especially since the previous two games are better. All of the changes only made what worked in previous games worse, and any actual fixes are so few and far between that they are hardly noticeable.

It is not a fun game and it should not be played.