There's no denying that the original Fable was something of a disappointment. Not that it was a particularly terrible game - it wasn't. But the game was lacking a great many features that, Peter Molyneaux, the game's designer, had promised would be present in the final product. I don't think he deliberately set out to deceive the gaming public, more likely that he realised that there was no way he was going to squeeze all the features he wanted into the game and release it on time. The end result being that he and his studio, Lionhead, delivered a product that didn't live up to the hype.

So you could be forgiven for approaching Fable 2 with some degree of trepidation. But I can at least say that Fable 2 is better than Fable 1. Like its predecessor, it's an action RPG, which casts you as an up and coming hero who, wouldn't you know it, is tasked with vanquishing the forces of evil. But you can't just rush up the villain of the piece and kick his face off - there's a number of sub-quests that have to be completed before you can confront him. These generally involve slaughtering your way through a variety of foes or keeping enemies off a computer controlled ally while they do something mystical and highly relevant to the plot.

As you might expect, there's plenty of sword-waving and spell-hurling afoot, but you also get to develop your character's gun slinging skills. You get to play with pistols, rifles and you can even get your hands on a blunderbuss, which is pretty handy for separating your foes heads from their shoulders. Combat is fairly easy to get to grips with, although there's absolutely no way for your character to be killed, so losing is no big deal. Yes, you read that right. Unusually for a role playing game, or indeed any kind of action game, your character cannot die. Instead, dying means that your character gets a scar on their body, and you might lose a few experience points. And then your character jumps up, and continues the fight, their health replenished.

Assuming, that is, you do decide to go around slaughtering things. There's plenty of other things to do in Fable 2. You can put your monster slaughtering on hold for a while, and get a job. You can be a blacksmith, a bar hand, a woodcutter and more, and the longer you stick with a job, the better you get it, and the more money you make. Which comes in handy, because the quests themselves don't pay particular well - if at all - and the money can be used to buy better weaponry. Unfortunately, the jobs are fairly boring and require you to undertake a mini-game where you repeatedly have to stop a moving green bar in just the right place. Why the game's designers decided to implement this system, I don't know. The bartending job alone could have made for a cool 'Tapper' style mini-game, but alas no.

Another less disappointing feature of Fable 2 is the way that the citizens of each town react to you. The game gives you the choice of being good or evil on a number of occasions, and choice you make in that respect affects both your appearance and your standing. Be an utterly evil sod and a lot of the citizens will be terrified of you, muttering under their breath whenever you pass. Alternately, should you be a good person, the citizens will sing your praises, and some of them, both male and female, will start suggesting you marry them. No, really. They just come out with stuff like 'You know what would look good on my finger? A ring.' They're not exactly subtle. But it gets even stranger - should you decided to marry one of them, and perhaps even start a family, it doesn't put the remaining villagers off at all. So you can be in your house with your wife, and your child and find that a bunch of admiring villagers have followed you in through your front door. And then they start proposing while your family is just watching.

In fact, Fable 2 as a whole is an odd game - it contains elements of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and The Sims, but reaches the lofty heights of neither. That's not to say it's a rubbish game - it's actually kind of fun to play through, being good or evil as is your want. But once you've played it through once, there's not a lot of reason to go back to it. It's actually quite a linear game - there is the odd sidequest or two, but these only serve as a brief diversion. There's certainly nothing along the lines of the separate side-quest branches found in Oblivion. In Fable 2, no matter whether your good or evil, the main quest unfolds in exactly the same way. And given that it's quite short, Fable 2 doesn't represent good value for money. I'd recommend renting Fable 2, and finishing it, which shouldn't take you long. If you really find yourself wanting to play it again, by all means buy it. But I wouldn't recommend buying it outright until you find yourself wanting more.