From the moment Fable 2 loads in your 360, it’s graphics will overwhelm you in a good way. The color palette seemed to bleed out of my HDTV into my living room like a pointillist painting spilling off the canvas onto the frame — Albion just a moment away down the right path. It’s a damn good thing then that Albion is a place I loved exploring during the 10-15 hours I spent with the Microsoft published, Lionhead developed Xbox 360-exclusive game.

Fable 2 tells the story of a young boy (or girl) who has nearly zero dollars to his/her name, an older sister playing parent and the choices he/she makes in the world they are presented with (that world of course being the aforementioned Albion). I am a boy and thus, I chose my prescribed gender and proceeded ahead with a journey that took me from the alleys of “Bowerstone” to the darkened halls of “The Spire.” To see how I fared, and find out why I suggest this RPG over Fallout 3, hit the jump.

If risk/reward gameplay ever had a definitive game to play as example, Fable 2 is it. From the very beginning, you’re tasked with making very black & white choices regarding your moral standing in the community — kill the roaches or bust up the shopkeeper’s supplies, give the lost warrants to the town sheriff or to the town gang leader — all of which will have a profound effect on that towns future-self, in addition to your own future-self, further along in the game.

Though early on I walked the fine line between selfish thief and saintly adventurer, it didn’t take long for me to treat game mechanics meant to distinguish between good and bad as an immediate means for item retrieval. For instance, should I enter the houses of town citizens illegally or should I buy the house and enter it legally? After two hours of deciding which path to walk at every moral stopping point, I threw morals to the side and played it how I wanted to — this is a game, right?

And this is Fable 2’s biggest failing point, albeit a failing of the medium it exists within rather than a game-specific problem. For all its talk of moral dilemma, it would take a real purist steeped deeply in the game’s lore to ignore the basis for nearly all moral choices in the game — you’re still playing a game, these choices still have little-to-no impact on the place where you make actual moral choices on a daily basis (the biggest game of all!).

In fact, throughout the entire game, I only found two legitimate spots where I was faced with moral dilemmas that affected me on an emotional level beyond that of the gameplay; places where I didn’t just consider the impact on my character’s personal wealth or a rare item I might retrieve for taking the moral high-ground but also the impact it had on me as a human being experiencing something moving.

(For fear of spoiling major plot-points, I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to distinguish the spots I’m speaking about above. Hint: Stephen Totilo felt similarly about one of them.)

Luckily though, regardless of the game’s emotional impact involving moral choices, Fable 2 delivers as a game in nearly every department. The previously mentioned graphics are a tour de force of colors mixed gorgeously with lighting to give players the illusion they’re running amok in a Paul Cezanne painting. Vistas are rich and vibrant, with wide-open pathways to explore, side-quests to discover and hidden enemies to rip apart.

And rip them apart I did! Though the game’s combat system starts off slowly, leveling up quickly becomes an elegantly simple-yet-complex metagame of trade-offs between different skills to spend your XP on. Want to learn new melee moves? Work on your strength tree! Interested in becoming a dark mage? Build up your will qualities. Your choices here make all the difference in not just how your character will play (hint hint, they’ll play to your strengths) but also how they will look. I couldn’t resist the magic combo system and as such, my character quickly brandished blue, pulsing lines across his body to reflect my emphasis on magic-based combat. Hands down, of all the hooks Fable 2 dug into me, it’s combat found deepest roots.

It wasn’t until I “died” for the first time during Fable 2’s combat, though, that I found the first of a few major game-changers. As opposed to restarting at your last checkpoint or savepoint or any of that nonsense, Lionhead has simply removed that inconvenience. Your character falls to the ground in slow motion, docking the XP you left laying on the ground (as opposed to collecting during the combat, without pause) and allowing you to get back up and rejoin the fight. No 30-second cutscene involving a valkyrie, no “You Are Dead” blood-written splashscreen — just a momentary pause artfully done and documentation of your lost XP. I wasn’t taken out of the game for a second.

Though some main quest moments felt a bit ham-fisted with moral choice (I’m looking at you, Spire level), the game overall left me feeling very impressed. It seems as though Mr. Molyneaux, long known for over-hyping his projects, has finally produced something he can say nails every claim made before release.

Long, engaging main story with plenty of side-quests to explore? Check. Beautiful environments with excellent sound direction backing them up? Check. A moral system directly tied to your in-game avatar’s appearance and the experiences that avatar has in the game’s world? Check! Hell, the game even has 2-player, drop-in/drop-out co-op play, though I’d have liked to bring my main character into friend’s games instead of a temporary avatar.

I liked Fable 2 so much in fact that when I picked up Fallout 3 a week later, I was heartily disappointed. Sure, the game’s an open world but it’s also a desolate and heart-darkening wasteland of an open world filled with brutally violent mutants and raiders. I already missed Albion and my treasure-finding, battle-hardened dog, Murderbrains. Luckily it’s just a step away.

Other Stuff You Might Wanna Know:

Developer: Lionhead Studios
Publisher: Microsoft
Release Date: 10/21/08
Available for: Xbox 360
Price: $60 (regular edition), $70 (collector’s edition)
Rating: (Buy It, Don’t Buy It, Rent It): Buy It