The review format is generally pretty straightforward, but when a game like Fable II strolls nonchalantly up to the plate you have to rethink things a bit. For the last few days I’ve been eating, drinking and sleeping Fable II - and I’m still left wondering if I’ve missed something that would open up a whole new paragraph, like so many meandering sidequests. Such is the nature of the game: open ended, sometimes overwhelming and full of possibility.

For those completely unaware, the Fable series is one that tries to tie the traditional world of the role playing game to moral choice in the fictional land of Albion. You decide what quests to take on, fully aware that your actions may come back to haunt you if you choose to be evil, while equally knowing that the ’good’ choice may be more time consuming, awkward or just plain thankless. Still, regardless of what choices you make, the raw day-to-day of the gameplay is largely similar – you equip yourself with swords, crossbows, guns and magic spells and go explore dungeons, caves and castles killing countess baddies in search of loot, fame and fortune.

The combat is a mixture of automatic lock-on ranged attacks and button tapping melee. As you upgrade your skills you can do advanced attacks, like counter-blocking and aiming at specific body parts, but even at this stage it’s quite possible to get by with the amateur beat-em-up enthusiast’s favourite strategy: button mashing. This seems to take another bow toward casual gaming with another break in convention: it’s impossible for your character to die. The closest you can come to this is being knocked out, at which point you do a Lazarus and dramatically bounce back to your feet, minus some experience points and with one more battle scar, which no doubt looks impressive to the village yokels, but will be a mark of failure you carry with you for the rest of the game.

Following on several hundred years after the original Fable, the story is an entirely new one meaning that new players won’t be lost, while old players will be amused with the subtle nods towards the original. Like the first, the plot is a clichéd affair about an evil pantomime villain trying to take over the world, and unsurprisingly the burden of stopping him falls entirely on your heroic shoulders. The twist to this deliberately fairytale storyline is that you don’t have to be the familiar muscle-bound goody two-shoes, and that you are free (and indeed encouraged) to make your own moral choices to forge your own destiny. You can even entirely ignore the tricky matter of the future of the world and concentrate on your career as a wood cutter/property tycoon/barman if you really feel like it. True, it wouldn’t make for much of a game, but the title is quite relaxed in advancing the plot, and you’re encouraged to go at your own pace being happily distracted along the way.