Fable

Well, I finished Fable a couple nights ago. It was a definitely quite cool.

The graphics and visual style are exellent. The animations are beautiful (people walking around, as you "emote", while in combat, with spells, etc). Heck, even the grass waves in the wind. Rad.

Combat in Fable is very smooth and straight-forward. I never really used my bow -- generally, I just play tanks that wade into combat. I did find the "Force Push" skill to be highly useful. Excellent for crowd clearing. At max'd level, it did some good damage, too. I'd bash a group with it, then run after one the guys. By the time the others picked themselves up and regrouped around me, then I'd push them all back again. It didn't work so well agains the big trolls tho :-)

The story line is rather light, but it works well. The various quests and progressive opening of areas leads you through the story very well.

One negative: the game would "stutter" every now and then when I ran places. It never did that in combat. I think it was mostly about loading new areas/textures.

I did just about every side quest and optional quest possible. All told, it took me about 22 hours to finish the game. I've heard that you can do it in 15; I just like to explore and see what else is doable. For example, I had four wives, about eight houses, and had travelled all over the place several times.

I'm not sure whether to reply it as evil now, though. Your alignment doesn't really change the gameplay that much, and I'm not sure that I want to put in the time just to see my character grow big old horns on his head.

I very much recommend Fable. It is a fantastic RPG. You have many, many ways to grow your character along different paths. The story is not deep, but the graphics are amazing, the potential character directions are simply incredible, and the quest/explore/combat is very good.