When Mel Brooks said, "It's good to be the king," he was talking about only one facet of the job. Sure, the parties can be fantastic and the furnishings are exquisite, but being in command of a kingdom is more of a royal pain than anything else.
When you first start "Fable III," you don't get that impression. As the youngest child of a legendary hero, you've heard the vague rumblings from the rabble that your brother, King Logan, is a tyrannical maniac. Maybe it's the random executions. Perhaps the high taxes and child labor have left negative impressions on the citizenry. Regardless, those kinds of complaints are beneath your station in life, but that changes quickly after a tragic turn of events. Soon you're scrambling to assemble an army. Enough is enough -- it's time for a revolution, baby!
As the prince or princess, you travel the lands of Albion with your mentor, Walter Beck. As luck (or fate) would have it, Walter just so happens to be friendly with a variety of assorted riffraff, rebels and revolutionaries. Those factions have one important thing in common: They cannot stand King Logan, and they will do whatever it takes to overthrow him. Since you're a member of the royal family, though, you have to win over each of those leaders by performing acts of heroism and doing a few favors.
Most of those missions are variations of the typical "go here, kill this, retrieve that" formula that we're accustomed to in adventure games. Fortunately, "Fable III" has more than a few tricks up its sleeves.
"Fable III" is the latest example of developer Lionhead's battle against cluttered interfaces. Much of the heads-up display has been stripped away, and combat is similarly bare. At least, that's how it seems at first.
There are three main types of attacks in the game -- melee, firearm, magic -- and each is performed by pressing the button that's permanently attached to it. You could conceivably get away with mashing away, but players who time the attacks to correspond to the action and charge attacks at the right time are treated to devastating finishers that show you flattening your opponent's head or perforating their backs in a dramatic slow-motion closeup.
Other genre mainstays are tweaked significantly, although sometimes it feels as though Lionhead is tinkering with things simply because it can. Character progression eschews a traditional leveling system in favor of a more literal experience system dubbed the Road to Rule. It's a nice way to present leveling up, although it doesn't fundamentally change the mechanics beneath such systems. The same can be said for the player's home base, called the Sanctuary. Staffed by Jasper the butler (voiced by John Cleese), it's an all-in-one visual replacement for the various menus players usually zip through to equip gear, fast travel and change appearance.
Lionhead's effort to replace abstract gaming concepts with more literal interpretations is interesting, but the overall effect is one of getting a flashy paint job instead of an arguably unnecessary overhaul.
