Fable II Co-op

My best buddy guy Darcy talked about Fable II for at least 2 years before it was released, possibly more like 3, and to be honest I thought he'd gone a bit soft in the head for this game. Well, the game was released last fall and I figured what the hell, if I don't waste time in this I'll waste time on something else so I gave it a shot. Now I'm not going to say this is the best game I ever played, even Darcy will agree that it didn't live up like it should have, but I will say that it is an entertaining way to waste many hours of your life, and this weekend I finally got a chance to try the vaunted co-op mode. What can I say? In a game that should have delivered more the co-op play should have delivered much more.

If you've played the game than much of this will be familiar to you and if you haven't I would highly recommend going out and at least renting it, it's fun. I'm not going to review this game but I will speak to the co-op portion of it today. Here it is in a nutshell: one person starts the game with whatever character they have available and then allows a friend to join in with a generic premade character; once in the game no one can control the camera, it's stuck on a static, usually to far away, position; the henchman, the person joining existing game, has limited interaction with NPC, Non-Playable Characters, and what interaction he does have is usually negative; why not let me use one of my characters, I'm playing on my own 360 so I've got all the computing power I need; finally, you only get one dog between the two of you.

Now none of these are game enders, you can still get together and have some fun, farting and belching while your friend is trying to pick up chicks, using magic and weapons to scare the locals and helping out in fights, all good real life things to do; I think we spent about ten minutes just running around in circles in a field, but that may not be to everyones taste. My problem is that it could have been so much more. For instance, allow both characters to interact with merchants and, more importantly, keep the visual mechanics the same for both single and co-op play, let me control my camera so I can be more effective in fights.

I'm fairly disappointed with this, one of my big beefs with games today is the limited number of quality co-op games out there, and this one would have been great. A good story with a good buddy and some good fights, it doesn't get much better than that. Sure the basics are there but that's all, it really feels more like an afterthought than a feature of the game, like a Beta that they stuck in for testing purposes. Not even letting me keep the appearance of my character? How cheap is that?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you haven't experienced Fable II give it a try, and if you have access to a friend and Xbox Live (lets be honest now, there are a lot of people out there who have one or the other but don't have both) then give the co-op a go, just don't expect too much from it. The game by itself is worth the buy, two downloadable packs have already been introduced to keep the game going and I'd be surprised if there weren't any more. If you've played Fable then you might be slightly disappointed with this sequel but I still think it's worth at least one play through.