Fable: The Lost Chapters [PC]

After Fable made a moderately-sized splash on Xbox last year, the promised PC port has finally arrived, complete with a pile of material the team didn't have time to include in the Xbox version. Some of the game's flaws are addressed; others are not, but nevertheless this is a beautifully designed and endearing game.

Fable's development, in a manner not untypical of its creator Peter Molyneux, was accompanied by some big talk - your hero would be able to have children, hangers-on who mimic your appearance, and so on. As tends to be the way with such ambitious concepts, it was scaled back drastically before it was released. Still, even without the crazier of Molyneux's ideas, it was a stylish, entertaining action-heavy RPG, although decidedly on the short and easy side.

Set in the verdant and pleasant world of Albion, in a typical faux-medieval style, Fable begins with a vignette depicting your hero as a boy, growing up in a tiny (and predictably ill-fated) village. From there, he's packed off to hero training school, to learn how to wave swords, shoot arrows, buckle swashes, and generally be heroic.

Fable's unique selling point is that as you complete quests and kill baddies, the choices you make are reflected in the appearance of your hero. Slaughter traders, ransack houses and kick puppies, and you'll grow haggard and horned. Do the whole Lancelot thing and you'll end up angelic-looking, and sparkle. In the right light, of course.

Your character also grows older during the game (while everyone else, oddly, stays the same age), can get married (repeatedly), get tattoos (and you can import your own images for these), and generally be dressed up to suit your whim. Often, cruising around town chatting up the ladies and trying on new outfits is as much fun as questing.

Having said all that, it's true that Fable never quite managed to cash in on the system. Later in the game, you can switch your alignment between good and evil very easily, making just about every other choice you make in the game temporary. Townspeople will cower before an evil hero, and cheer a good one, but beyond that this feature doesn't actually affect the gameplay all that much.

Fable's main course, once you're through with all that preening, is a mostly linear series of the most generic of generic fantasy quests. To be fair, a good number have interesting narrative, strong cutscenes or humorous touches, but it's go-there-kill-this just about all the way through.

Graphically, Fable harks back to its Xbox roots a little too much. Although the character models still look good, and the way your character morphs as you make good or evil choices is still gripping, the environmental graphics are tired. The zones are awfully small by modern standards, too, and while it's still a pretty game, it's by no means a technically impressive one.

Controls are often an issue for console-to-PC ports, and an issue for PC third-person games in general. Performing most tasks in Fable is straightforward, although you'll do better with one of those fancy mice with plenty of buttons. Melee combat is easy, shooting arrows is even more straightforward, and on the whole the issue is handled with considerable style.

Except for the magic system, that is. Whether it's for balance reasons or technical ones we can't say, but you can still only have two spells at your fingertips at any one time. You can swap out spell pairs quickly, but it would have been much slicker to just let us map all the spells to a row of keys.

Fable still doesn't put up much of a challenge. Even button-mashers won't have much trouble with most fights. For the one or two harder ones, the game's so generous with its "resurrection potions" - think extra lives - that you can survive just about anything. It doesn't matter that the unintuitive save system from the Xbox is still there, because you'll rarely need to fall back on it.

But the other big gripe with the Xbox version, the game's length, has been addressed. It's still no Baldur's Gate II, but with the addition of a pile of new content taking place after the end of the main quest, it'll maybe swallow 15 hours rather than just ten. This new content - new locations, quests, cut-scenes, the works - takes place in the frozen northern region of Albion, and dovetails very nicely with the rest of the game. If you've already played Fable through, it's probably not exciting enough to warrant the effort spent on reaching it, but otherwise it makes a fine addition.

So what's the moral of the story? Fable makes the leap to PC with few hitches. The additional content goes a long way to address our main original issue with the game, its length, but on the PC it's hanging with a tougher crowd. Graphically it's a generation behind its peers, and the control system betrays its Xbox roots, but if you can put up with that you're pretty much guaranteed a good time.