It’s important to remember that a game that sets out to immerse you in its world really has to work hard to get you to relate and feel akin with either the characters you’re controlling or the characters in its world. If you feel no emotion towards your character or its world, you feel detached from the story and ultimately detached from the experience as a whole. In general, what Fable II sets out to achieve it hits upon most and only misses on a few, but the unexpected emotional attachment that you will walk away with upon its completion is its redeeming factor.

Fable II, like its predecessor is an action-adventure hero simulator. You start the game as a homeless Bowerstone kid nicknamed Sparrow who, together with your older sister Rose, dream of a better life – a dream that both children believe will come true, if only they could gain access to the grandeur Castle Fairfax.

The early stages of your life as an Albion whipper-snapper will act as both the tutorial and introduction to the game and for those of us who have played the original, it affords us a welcome refresher on what it’s like to play Fable again. And let’s get this straight, this game undoubtedly feels like Fable.

On a side note, but a note that needs to be mentioned is the choppy framerate. Over the course of the game this either dissipated or I grew used to it, but the sluggish screen redraw was, at first, enough to annoy. One of the best aspects of the original Fable was its silky smooth framerate. Admittedly, when the action reached its peak and there were more enemies on screen than there are grains of sand on Bondi, it chugged along. As a whole though, the game felt decidedly very polished because of its framerate and it was a shame to realise that my next gen system couldn’t handle the might of the Fable II engine. A smile gripe, but a gripe none the less.

Early on you come across a bully who is bothering the local stray dog and you are presented with one of the game’s first moral choices, of which it has many. Regardless of whether you choose to help the stray and belt the bully or you ignore the altercation, this mutt will become your lifelong companion. And Peter Molyneux, I applaud you sir. The addition of this seemingly small gameplay element is a stroke of genius and is the tie that forever bound me to my character. This flea-ridden mongrel will dominate your attention throughout the game and will be the first and last thing you think of when choosing a path or entering into battle.

Your childhood culminates with both the end of the tutorial and Sparrow coming face to face with Lucien, your nemesis for the remainder of the game. This first dramatic scene sets a solid precedent for Fable II’s story. It’s not over the top, but it does a great job of keeping you interested and motoring along. You are brought close to death after this first encounter, but your sister isn’t so lucky. Skip ahead to your teenage years and you awake to the voice of your guide for the rest of your days in Albion. She tells you that you carry the bloodline of the heroes of Albion and you are destined to stop Lucien from building a spire of great power that is destined to destroy the world. Along the way you are tasked with seeking out three heroes – a Will user, a Brawler and a Ranged Marksman. The story is just deep enough to keep you from getting bored, but the scriptwriters won’t be winning the videogame equivalent of an Oscar.

Morality and the Butterfly Effect is the glue that holds Fable II together, and the hook that sets it apart from other RPGs. For example, the choices you made as a child during your brief time in Bowerstone will be reflected as you wander its streets as an adult. Depending on your choice during a particular quest as a child, Bowerstone Old Town will either be run-down or the pinnacle of high society. These are nice touches and while most of them are pointed out to you, you will notice them yourself as you grow older in its world.

Another, more dramatic example, was a quest where I should’ve helped the monks of the Temple of Light. I put off this quest for one reason or another, but after I had completed about half of the game’s story, I decided to finally make my way to the starting point of the quest. Upon my arrival I discovered that due to my lack of action, the monks’ temple had burned and the religion itself was on shaky ground. The feeling that came over me while standing outside the ruins of this temple was quite profound. This had happened because of what I had or hadn’t done. I couldn’t go back to a previous save because, really, where would I go back to? These decisions are final and are quite shocking when you realise that you are powerless to change the game’s destiny. The emotion of these choices only gets stronger and you quickly realise that there is a sense of urgency and sacrifice when choosing your quests. Completionists beware!

The decisions you make in Fable II not only affect the world around you, but also your appearance. By the end of my first run through, I had turned into a completely corrupt, overweight businessman with quite a substantial real estate portfolio. Due to how corrupt I was, I now had a black band across my eyes and I resembled the Hamburglar. Your pooch also changes appearance. The more Good you are, the lighter and friendlier your dog is. The more Evil you are, the more your dog starts to look like the beasts at of the end of Ghostbusters.

There is a lot to do in the world of Albion. If so desired you could be a real estate mogul, a weapons trader, a drunkard bigamist pirate or a rogue mage living in the swamplands. This obviously allows for multiple play throughs, but the drawback here is that you need to progress through the main storyline to unlock new locations on your map. This is unlike games like Oblivion or Fallout 3 where if you were to restart the game with a new avatar you could completely bypass the main storyline and use the world as a pure RPG sandbox. While the story is fantastic the first time through, the twists and turns the next time through would definitely be dulled and the game would start to feel like a grind and sour your experience.

The humour of Fable II is fantastic and adds a great amount of charm to each and every quest. Some of it is subtle, most of it is funny but all of it goes a long way to making you feel that the world you inhabit isn’t a boring one. The third hero that you meet will have you in stitches with his camp and pompous attitude and make sure you look out for the name of the door that you need to exit at the end of his story arc.

Combat in Fable II was one of the most anticipated and talked about features of the game during early development. Early tech demos of the Fable II engine boasted one button, context-sensitive fighting. If you were close enough to a chair during a bar fight, you would pick up said chair and smash it across a bandit’s face. Awesome right? Well true to Molyneux form, this never made it into the final build of the game. Single button combat turned into three button combat with each of your fighting disciplines being mapped to X for Melee, Y for Ranged and B for Will. It works as well as it did in the first game with only the Will side of things receiving a fairly decent overhaul. You can no longer move while charging up a spell which adds to your vulnerability as a mage. You have a tiered ‘Will Tower’ where you can place any of the spells you have purchased with your experience points. When charging your Will, your meter will rise and the last circle to fill up is the spell you will cast. This isn’t explained to you in the game and I had to open the manual to figure out just how it worked. My assumption was that if I charged a combination of spells then I would have some kind of super spell - stopping time, raising the dead, fire-balling and then shocking. In hindsight, I guess balance was the reason that I was incorrect in my assumption. It still would’ve been awesome though, right?

Experience points are collected from fallen enemies, eating and taking potions allowing you to buy upgrades. These upgrades really allow you to tweak the way your character plays. If you choose to be a ranged fighter then you can upgrade to manual aim and higher accuracy. It really feels like you’re building your very own Albion hero that’s tailored to your liking.

The quests throughout Fable II will take you from dank dungeons, through misty swamps and into treasure-filled pirate coves and each and every quest on which I embarked turned out to be loads of fun. Not one of the quests I played felt like a grind and each was adequately paced and never seemed too long.

A feature that has turned out to be nothing more than a tacked-on, last-minute boxart bullet-point is the online co-op. Battling my way through Albion with a friend and showing off my character's get-up and weapons was a much anticipated addition to Fable II. While we did get the co-op, it's barely worth mentioning. You can enter a friend's game as nothing more than a henchman and the camera itself is further proof that this feature was an after-thought. The camera requires that both players be 'on-screen' at the same time which leaves you and your co-op buddy feeling like you're on Big Brother: Friday Night Games and you're playing that game where you're both tethered by a giant rubber band. P.S. Mike Goldman, I hate you and I hope I spelled your name wrong.

I’ll be honest though, Fable II comes across a little average. It does what it does well, it introduces a few neat gameplay elements that build on the success of the original game, but about 3/4 of the way through this decidedly short RPG I found myself thinking, “Okay… so, is this it?” It wasn’t until the last hour or two of gameplay that I was shot like a circus daredevil from average to special and I landed in my safety net stunned, speechless and questioning the way I had played the game.

You will find it difficult to stop yourself from playing out the last part of Fable II without taking a break. It captivates even the most time poor of us. It’s filled with some very surprising twists and turns and after playing out a game full of moral choices you are presented with one last difficult decision to make. The result of which left me alive and on the shore wondering whether I even wanted to play out the rest of my life in Albion. It’s not spoiling anything by saying that with each choice there is significant sacrifice. The sense of loss that you feel following the story’s climax is, once again, profound.

Never has a game made me feel more for the protagonist and its loved ones than Fable II, even despite the fact that aside from a few grunts, laughs and growls your character is silent throughout the game. This reason alone makes it well worth the jump from a mediocre let-down to a 5 star, must-play game. But don’t take my word for it, you need to play this game for yourself and you need to play it through ‘til the end. After all, everyone’s story will play out different, but you will all enjoy Fable II.