I decided to dig back into Fable II after not having played it since Fallout 3 came out. I had just gotten the first hero, so I wasn't very far into the game, but it still took me a surprisingly long amount of time to get back into the flow of things. The biggest hindrance is the piss-poor menu design (why are the detailed region maps three clicks deep???), which is still laggy even after installing the game to my hard drive, but it's also a little too easy to accidentally set villagers on fire when the button layout isn't burned into your brain.
Like someone else said, Fable 2 is this awkward mixture of Oblivion and Fable 1 where you're sort of on rails but sort of have some freedom to explore. It's very inconsistent in letting you wander off the beaten path, which makes finding all the hidden keys/gargoyles/chests kind of a big pain in the ass, but it also means that there's not
However, after an hour or so of adjustment, I got back into the swing of things and started enjoying myself again. The combat is fairly fun with all three weapons (level 3 time + level 5 fire for a good time), though after playing PoP I wish they would've done more with the timing windows and how they communicate to the user how and when to perform combos. Something just doesn't feel quite right about the sword combat, and I hate that there's not a dedicated block button. It basically turns into "roll in, swipe 3 times, roll out" over and over and over.
I'm also not finding myself particularly engaged in the story or the cutscenes, which is unfortunate because I really liked how it started off.
I just finished the Crucible and I'm about to head to the Spire...is there anything I need to do before I go down this quest line?