Okay, so I got Fable 2 the other day (Tuesday) and I finally got around to playing it last night.
But before I give you my review and thoughts on it, let me first say, I played the first one and found some fun in it, but wasn’t very impressed at all by it. Also, my #1 reason to get the 2nd one was because of the co-op feature, which was their main selling point.
So I get the game and sign on xbox live, friend gets on and we both can’t figure out how to start a co-op game. The only option is New Game. So whatever, we do that get in the game… and all I see is his xbox live icon running around the screen, so I’m like ‘wtf is this crap, oh I can interact with it’. So I invite him and FINALLY I see his character in the game with me.
First thing we notice, there’s a FIXED CAMERA and you can’t move any further than 15ft from each other. I can understand if we were both playing co-op on the same console/tv that there would be a fixed camera, but no. Fixed camera in co-op on seperate TVs. Constantly, we were just running into walls and crap because we can’t see where we are going.
So we sort of get the hang of the camera issue and decide to play on. That is until we reached a loading screen for a new city. The new city loads and we spawn on opposite sides of the city. He’s behind a gate and I’m next to a building. The camera being on my character, I try to run to him, but I’m stuck between two pillars and a building. Like so:
him
------------------
| building |
|______________|
o me o
…and I’m sure your thinking, ‘oh just run back and go around the pillars’… yeah I thought the same thing, but it comes back to the “can’t be more than 15ft away from each other”. So we can’t run backwards to get around anything. Restart the game… 2nd time SAME THING… stuck, Restart… 3rd time spawned us at the same place.
Next thing we notice, he can’t talk to ANYONE in the game, but I can. And after going through a dungeon, and getting a bunch of experience, I think ‘oh yeah, I can upgrade by skills’. Then, we decide to get some new weapons and armor right, well guess what, the 2nd player can’t talk to anyone, NOR can they pick up any items from chests or anything. The 2nd player is stuck with the armor and weapon they received when they started playing with you.
Basically the 2nd player is just a walking slave to you. All they can do is fight enemies and stand there. They don’t get good or bad points either. To me this isn’t CO-OP. Co-op would be sharing the full game experience while having the freedom to do what you want with your character.
So overall, my experience with this game’s co-op features is complete crap. I absolutely hate it and am very disappointed I spent $60 on it. I don’t care for the single player, as I said earlier I bought it for the co-op. So don’t take my review on the single player experience, but if you were looking for co-op, my advice is go elsewhere.