Fable III picks up many years after Fable II left off: the Hero of the previous game has shuffled off this mortal coil and left their eldest son, Logan, in charge of Albion. Logan is proving to be an incredibly ruthless ruler, executing dissidents left and right while wrapping an iron fist around Albion’s industrial heart. It is up to the player, the child of the Hero who at last demonstrates your own Heroic prowess, to stir a rebellion and launch a revolution against your hate mongering older brother. Traveling the world of Albion, all the while headhunted by your own flesh and blood, you are called upon to perform good deeds and make promises to the people who agree to stand by you when the time to overthrow Logan arrives. The game grinds the inevitable gears of morality when it finally calls upon you to keep to your word: and therein lies Fable III’s killer blow.

The first three quarters of Fable III are almost identical to the gameplay and general setting of Fable II, which makes for a boring six or seven hours if, like me, you sank a considerable amount of time into Fable II’s quests and combat. Combat involves mashing X, B, or Y depending on whether you want to use melee, magic or ranged weapons, although some tweaks have been made to the leveling system used for your various skills and spells. Apparently, a lot of the players of Fable II underwent a lobotomy before approaching the old experience system (which involved the distribution of collected experience towards whichever area you wanted to focus on – skill, will, or strength respectively) and couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so they did away with that. I’m assuming that the people unable to operate Fable II’s leveling system also have trouble operating door knobs and opening the fridge, because the replacement system is so inextricably boring and uncustomisable it takes a huge chunk of the Role Play out of this RPG.

Combat sees the player collect guild seals, which can be spent on The Road To Rule to open chests which simply level up the strength of your chosen weapon. As far as combat customisation goes, that’s it. The designers clearly tried to offset this by offering the player weapons with different unlockable elements – one sword helps you lose weight once you get fat while using it, for example. Unfortunately, all of the weapons offered tend to be underpowered compared to your own weapon (once it is leveled) and can give you a gimmicky bonus at best. Despite searching high and low for a nice new sword, as I loved upgrading all my weaponry in Fable II, I completed the game with the original set given to me right at the start because there was just no point in changing.

So, you plod through the game, killing a lot of things and holding hands with a lot of other things (well, people) and generally rollicking around in a bunch of escort missions and fight-to-the-death missions and so on. Essentially, it’s Fable II. The flit switches come back, albeit briefly. They use the same musical score, which was so grating that I muted the game because if you can’t be bothered to compose new music for a new title, why should I bother to listen? At least remix it or something.

You even have a dog, whose origin is not explained and so I really couldn’t care less about his well being because he’s just there, barking and whining and asking me to dig for things when a Hollow Man is trying to eat my shoulder. Was this dog a present from my brother Logan, and so acts as a horrible, constant reminder of my past? Was he a stray who stumbled into the castle kitchen, and who I nursed back to health by the fire, forming a strong bond that will last beyond death? Did I steal him from some unfortunate child? It is never explained, and so I spent the entire game ignoring him or trying to shoot him.

There were a couple of saving graces in this section of the game which brought a smile to my face, however. One was the return of Reaver, voiced to perfection by Stephen Fry. While last time he fought (begrudgingly) at your side, Reaver is now a sworn enemy who has been handed control of Albion’s industry, and he spends a significant amount of time trying to kill you, until you become Ruler of Albion, at which case he begins nibbling lovingly at your toes. Another was the gnomes quest, pretty much identical to the gargoyle’s quest of Fable II except, well, it’s gnomes you have to hunt down and shoot. I loved it because the things they shout at you to get your attention are genuinely rather funny, and surprisingly rude. I found myself quite affronted at a sexist slur by a gnome hiding in a tree, and took great pleasure in blowing his head right off.

The game’s crowning moment, rather than being your ascent to the throne, is a subquest in which three “wizards” ask you to rescue a princess from a tower. You are shrunk onto a model of a castle and its surrounding lands, and so begins a total deconstruction of the creation of video games which had me smiling in appreciation throughout, if not laughing aloud. All the humour which should have been spread throughout the game was compacted into this single, half hour quest, and it proved to be the greatest demonstration of the Lionhead spirit I encountered throughout my ten hours of play. It stands out as the single most memorable segment of the game and I wish there had been more of the same on offer.

So, once you’ve trudged through the first three quarters, making promises willy nilly and killing enough Hollowman to build an entire house out of skulls, you finally become Ruler and everything in Albion is peachy. Except, it isn’t. You have to keep your promises to everyone and, surprise surprise, it’s going to be harder than you expected. There’s a huge twist involved which I won’t reveal, but it’s safe to say that the entire process of making moral choices as Ruler is deeply unpleasant, no matter which route you take. Of course, the designers are trying to make a point here: you can’t just be really nice and expect everything to work out great. Making choices when you’re in a position of power is very hard. Money is scarce. I really needed to be reminded of that last one, by the way.

Morality tends to be at the core of Fable games but there’s a significant lack of balance in Fable III’s delivery. The first choice you are called upon to make, right at the game’s beginning, is genuinely heart wrenching as there is no right answer. My hopes were high at this point that true grey area morality would come into play. Alas, it was not to be. The rest of your choices, which are all piled on top of you once you become Ruler, are blatantly “good” or “evil” in a way which makes them laughable. Do you refurbish an orphanage or turn it into a brothel? You decide, your Highness.

So, all in all, the game is at its best before you become Ruler, at which point it collapses under its own righteousness and stops being any fun to play whatsoever. However, until you become Ruler, you are essentially playing Fable II with a few aesthetic changes and an overhauled menu system which made things worse, not better, in terms of item navigation and customisation. If you must play Fable III, rent it, as you’ll be done in a matter of days and you’ll save yourself some cash. If you want your own copy, buy Fable II (it’ll be dirt cheap now). If you already own Fable II, play it again and then when you’re done ask yourself if you’d hug a child or kick him in the face. That experience will be a close enough approximation of what Fable III has to offer.