WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE
Even killing and looting can get old
Fable Heroes alternates the beating-stuff-up with a few interesting alternatives. Each level usually has a fork at the end, which offers a choice: end the stage by fighting a boss or end it by doing something else. “Something else” encompasses a number of minigames, generally either button-mashing races or exotic forms of chicken abuse. There’s a four-player chicken soccer game (kick the chickens in your goal and away from everyone else’s) and something called “Chicken Bomb” (survive as long as possible in a ring full of exploding chickens).
Those alternate endings give each level some replayability, and so does “Dark Albion,” an unlockable version of the game world with new visual details and tougher difficulty. Still, if they wanted to have some real longevity, the action levels central to Heroes needed to pack in more layers of depth.
Four Swords has complex stages built around hidden dungeon areas and some fairly compelling puzzles. Gauntlet has maze-chase exploration and a wide variety of challenging gimmick monsters. Fable Heroes doesn’t have much of anything like that. Ninety percent of the time, it is strictly a race to bash mindless, lumbering foes and grab coins.
Camera troubles and other glitches
A problem that often comes up in games like these is what to do when one player goes left and one goes right. Fable Heroes tends to pay attention to the player moving toward the end of the level. The camera will sometimes focus on them to the point that anyone lagging behind will disappear off the screen.
While Heroes is basically a side-scroller, the stages aren’t laid out along a completely straight line. They have some kinks and turns and obstacles that players can get stuck on. As such, if you’re hung up behind a piece of the background and you’ve disappeared off the leftmost edge of the television…well, good luck. An extraordinarily unscrupulous player can even exploit this quirk if they’re careful, trapping the competition while they run up and grab all the coins from a cluster of enemies single-handedly.
That’s more a design problem than a technical glitch, but players should watch out for a few of those as well. Although the online game runs smoothly almost all of the time, we ran into a crash during the Aurora level while playing our first session on Xbox Live, forcing a hard reboot of the console.
Areas that pile on lots of particles and special effects can trip over brief but nasty patches of slowdown, too, which came as a surprise. Beneath the cute puppet-play art direction (which carries the game pretty far, to be fair), Heroes isn’t any great graphical showcase. The engine should have been able to keep up no matter what.
CONCLUSION
So does Fable Heroes add up to 40 dollars worth of game? 30 dollars? 20 dollars? Probably not. To justify a higher price point, it would need more depth, more impressive graphics, and more technical polish. A sequel with all of those wouldn’t be such a bad idea, in fact. As it is, though, it’s worth 10 bucks plus the trouble of getting enough friends together to ensure a properly chaotic loot-grabbing experience.
Score: 70/100
Fable Heroes will be released on May 2, 2012 for the Xbox 360. The publisher provided a download code for the purpose of this review.