Barbelith Underground > Games & Gameplay

I've got the Xbox version of the original. It's a lot of fun, although it's difficult to get away from all the broken promises that were made during its development.

You really noticed the restrictions on your movement. There's the map screen, for one thing, and the way that it made plain the total lack of freedom you had to explore, but the areas themselves were just as bad - fairly straight paths that may as well be corridors, with clearly marked entry and exit points.

The same lack of freedom had a big impact on the good/evil stuff, which was extremely binary. The worst thing about it was how some choices would make no sense whatsoever and had no lasting effect on the gameworld. Come back to a completed save file with a good character and there was no significant differences in the world around you than playing a completed save file with an evil character - despite there being clear and obvious differences displayed during the respective end sequences.

Combat was pretty duff, I thought. The lock-on had a habit of breaking at random moments and would go totally bananas whenever there were a number of enemies on the screen.

It's fairly notorious for being a work in progress, rushed out into the shops before it was anywhere near finished. Entire plot threads were started and then left to dangle, which was simply frustrating. One fairly large one involved a family murder, for example, and yet despite having all the evidence to hand, despite knowing exactly what had happened and who was responsible, the player was powerless to do anything to bring the culprit to justice. You could, in fact, marry hir and suffer no consequences to your reputation as a hero.

Optional missions, too. There are about two of them, right at the beginning of the game, and then that's your lot - obvious that there were supposed to be far more, only development was called to a halt before they were included. Inlcude the fact that you're allowed to carry on with the game once the main storyline is done and dusted and the credits roll, only there's very little point in doing so.

Even with all those problems (and there were a bunch more, too, although those are the most serious of the ones I can remember right now) I still got a lot of enjoyment from the game. Possibly because I wasn't taken in by the hype that had been spread around by Peter Molyneux - head of Lionhead - during its protracted development. All that guff about getting your hair cut a certain way and having kids in towns copy it if you were a hero, about trees growing in real time - having bought and played Black & White, I think I had a pretty good handle on how much of what came out of his mouth was actually going to be realised by the team working on the game and how much of it was bullshit. It's good that he gets so excited about his company's projects, but constantly getting overexcited by them and consequently under-delivering has done them some real harm.

I *might* get this, when it's a bit cheaper. I can't justify paying full whack for a game that is, in effect, a completed version of an unfinished title that I already own. I'd also need to hear some opinions from people who've played both this and the original.

By the way, Flowers, Microsoft didn't play much of a part in the creation of the game - they're just the publisher. They've not been that bad of a publisher in recent years, though, so I think the abstract's kind of unfair.

Fable