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Unless you’ve been following reviews and the like, Heroes of fables almost certainly not what you expect. Lionhead Studios’ action RPG series is known for its unique sense of style, heavy focus on player choice, and expression-based character interaction. Heroes of fableson the other, is a side-scrolling brawler with RPG elements, a unique board game-like character progression mechanic, and some of the most relentless art style imaginable.
Fans Castle Crashers will find that many comparisons can be drawn here. You can choose from a variety of characters, all equipped with different weapon layouts. The basic set of tools you work with are a standard attack, a heavy attack, an area attack (which drains one life heart per use) and a defensive combat caster, but the feel of the hero’s sword-based combat is different from, say, the Reaver’s pistol. You’ll use these tools as you move from left to right through a series of familiar yet stylized Albion locations, taking on the usual selection of enemies – everything from Hobbes to Balverines to Hollow Men – and collecting coins that explode from their fallen corpses.
You’ll always bring four characters to a certain stage, though there’s no switching between them as you play. AI manages the other three, though both local and online co-op are options. Each character slowly builds up a supply of coins, both by collecting them and by achieving successful hits. These earnings are then used after each stage to improve that character’s skills.
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As you level up Heroes of fables it is based in large part on how happy you are. Your characters are placed on a Monopoly-like game board. Everyone who participated in the just completed stage earns a certain number of dice rolls based on how much gold they picked up. Each field on the game board is associated with a specific skill category, everything from attacks and gold bonuses to enemy-specific power-ups. As you move around the board and land on different fields, you can choose to spend some of your gold on one of the field skills available. While the implementation is flawed in some ways – we’ll get to that in a minute – the basic concept of board game-based leveling is actually kind of neat and addictive, definitely adding a “just one more level” impulse to the overall experience.
Unfortunately, all is not well in Albion. For starters, there are only a few stages to go through before you get to “The Credits” (actually a playable level). Complete them once and you’ll unlock the “dark” (read: night) variants, which bring a slightly altered challenge on the same set of cards with a swapped palette. There’s a special boss waiting for you at the end of the Dark Albion stages, but that’s about it. There’s an extra level, The Cloud, that won’t unlock until the community hits the combo gold milestone, so I haven’t been able to check that one.
Each of the levels, Light and Dark also offers two possible ways to close a stage: either a boss fight or a competitive challenge of some sort that usually involves things like pressing a button for a certain amount of time or kicking. All of this adds to the feeling that you’re playing a game that’s been artificially padded to create the feeling of a deep experience even though it’s not actually very deep. It even works for a while; I was constantly fighting the urge to play another level, earn another die, buy another ability.
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Unfortunately, there are cracks within this basic framework that begin to show after a few hours. First of all, each stage follows the same formula. You’ll progress, fight a group, repeat that process a few times, come across a large container or object to destroy for coins — unimaginatively named “Break Time” — repeat the pattern of progressing through combat a few more times, and finally choose between fighting bosses or competitive confrontation.
Then there is the board game. Although it’s great to progress this way, especially since it exists interior a game board with more advanced skills that you can unlock by fully leveling up characters and unlocking a handful of achievements also fails. The process to unlock all of the board’s inner fields is challenging to the point of boredom, to begin with. There are also no rewards or bonuses for characters who land on a field they’ve already unlocked abilities for. It’s just a wasted roll of the dice. Since you’ll generally only get two or three per level, the leveling process quickly gets bogged down and becomes a frustrating grind.
There are also just some basic design issues. There is no easy way, for example, to divide the gold among your characters. You have to actively control the character you want to give money to. If you’re in multiplayer and another player is using a character with most of your gold supply, your friend will have to switch to another character before you can switch, transfer the gold, and go back. It’s a welcome feature, the ability to share gold, but half-baked.
Plus, it’s also incredibly easy to lose your character mid-battle when enemies start spawning. You can press and hold the right trigger to highlight the character you’re controlling with a circle of light at his or her feet, but even that can be hard to see in a crowd. It’s a feature the game doesn’t even bother to teach you; the first phase introduces you to the most basic combat mechanics, but things like highlighting your character or building multipliers are either ignored or given only cursory explanations.
Conclusion
The overall impression is of a game that could have been something strong and different for Fable series, but falls short due to a series of questionable design choices and seemingly unfinished execution. Heroes of fables it offers fun moments, no doubt, but it feels rushed and unfinished, like a game that was almost there when the order came down from on high to quickly fix all the broken stuff and throw it out. It’s a hard game to recommend for these reasons, although it could make for a good time at parties.
(This game was reviewed on Xbox 360 on a copy provided by Microsoft Studios)
Editor’s recommendations
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn