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Author's Note: First off, just let me say I've not played Fable on the XBox. I don't even own an XBox. I approached this game fresh and untainted by the hype that led up to the XBox game's release. Only after I played Fable: The Lost Chapters did I hear tales of grand expectations and broken promises and about features that never ultimately saw the light of day. Therefore, I'll not refer to the XBox version of the game for any sort of comparison, nor will I get bogged down in the “coulda, shoulda, woulda” complaints about what the game might have been. My job here is to tell you about what the game is and of my experiences in playing it.

Fable: The Lost Chapters tells the tale of a hero, his quest for justice (or revenge) and his destiny for greatness. At the beginning of the story, the hero is a small boy in the small town of Oakvale on a perfectly beautiful day. The first quest sets you off to earn (or otherwise acquire) the money to buy your sister a birthday gift. From the outset, choices must be made that will define your personality and your future. Soon, as pretty much always happens on perfectly beautiful days in video games, something horrible happens that changes the world forever.

You soon join the Heroes' Guild and train there for many years. This is the tutorial portion of the game, where you'll learn the controls and get a chance to practice at melee, ranged and magical combat before heading into danger. The game really gets going when you graduate as a full fledged hero and start accepting quests.

It should be noted that “hero” in this game does not have any altruistic context to it. There can indeed be evil heroes. In fact, many of the quests call for just that. Often, two quests will be available, offering you a choice between honorable and evil actions. For instance, one pair of quests is about an apple orchard that is being raided by bandits. One quest sends you to join the guards and fight off the bandits while the other quest lets you defend the bandits while they make off with the loot.

As you complete quests, the hero gains renown among the citizens of the world and his alignment shifts toward good or evil depending on your actions. Actions outside of quests can affect alignment, too. Stealing from cabinets and bookcases in people's homes earns points toward evil. Killing inherently evil enemies like bandits or the undead will earn small bonuses toward good.

The NPC’s in the various towns will react to your presence and comment on your accomplishments. If you're good, they will fawn over you; if you're evil, they will shriek with terror and flee or mumble demurely so as not to attract his wrath. This alignment also affects your appearance. An especially evil hero's eyes will glow red, two nasty looking horns sprout from his skull and a swarm of flies constantly buzz around his head.

Two other factors which play a large role in how NPC’s react to the hero's presence are the Attractiveness and Scariness modifiers. Both are essentially indicators of the hero's physical appearance. Things like hair styles, beards, tattoos and clothing can have dramatic effects on these attributes. If the hero is more attractive than he is scary, and if his renown gets high enough, then people (women and men both) will start to fall in love with him. If you nurture this spark of romance, it can be kindled into a relationship and even marriage.

Each major town has one house which you can buy and settle down with a spouse. Alternatively, you can rent out the house and upgrade its furnishings for a steady gold profit. Other buildings in the towns can also be purchased and rented out...but only if their current owners meet an untimely demise. Real estate is a cut throat business.

Committing murder or other crimes in town is risky as guards patrol everywhere. It's not impossible, mind you. Just wait until no one is looking (a handy icon tells shows how many people are eyeballing the hero at any given time) and swipe goods from cabinets in people's houses or bash barrels or knock out windows or hack villagers to death with your axe. Villagers and guards don't mind corpses, so long as they don't witness the killing itself.

If you get caught, you'll owe a fine. A guard will quickly charge up to the hero and demand payment. If you don't have the cash or you refuse to pay, the guards don't give you another chance. They'll draw their swords and attack. If you fight back, your debt to society will only grow with each guard you kill. If the guards manage to overpower you, you'll be thrown out of town until you can either pay or until the guards' rather short memory fades and everyone forgets the massacre you brought on your last trip.

There's quite a bit of optional content in Fable: The Lost Chapters. You can buy entire towns, participate in various activities like the Fist Fighter's Guild or the Chicken Kickin' Contest. You can make a fortune by trafficking goods between NPC’s. You can go fishing or dig for buried treasure. It’s a kind of a limited sim world in the middle of an RPG.

All that stuff is fine and good, but in my opinion, the real meat of a good RPG is in its story. Fable: The Lost Chapters' story is somewhere between mediocre and good. Some of the central characters are rather thin and some major events in the game refer to elements of a back story that just aren't very well explained. Still, the story did keep me interested. I was never bored by it. Quite the opposite, I was always eager to get on to the next main story quest to see what might happen next.

Combat is real-time and it comes with all the quirks and clumsiness of any other real-time action game. The port from console style controls to the PC's mouse and keyboard is only partially successful. A big problem that many action games face is camera control in the middle of frantic combat and Fable: The Lost Chapters is no exception.

Lionhead, the developers of the game, approaches this problem by offering two modes of camera control. The default is what I'll call “free targeting” mode. The mouse always controls the camera and when the camera is rotated so that the hero is looking at an enemy, that enemy gets a red glow and is the target of any attacks. Unfortunately, the enemy doesn't stay put and can easily move such that the glow goes away and the target is lost. This isn't as big a problem when you're melee fighting against groups of enemies. Big weapons and wide swings lessen the importance of precision targeting. For ranged combat with a bow or magic, though, this free targeting mode just doesn't cut it.

The other option is a “target lock” mode that makes the hero always face the enemy. To lock onto a target you must first point the camera at it so it gets the red glow I mentioned before. Then a tap of the target lock key does the trick. This does a pretty good job when there's only one foe, but it can be maddeningly frustrating to try and target a particular enemy in the middle of a group. Also, several battles require the hero to move around a lot to avoid ranged attacks. Terrain objects can obscure the camera and disengage the “target lock”, likely causing the hero to be facing the wrong way when he attacks.

Another problem with the control is one that I hope has nothing to do with Microsoft's and Logitech's being competitors and which I hope will be addressed quickly in a patch. Blocking enemy attacks is absolutely vital to successful gameplay. Lionhead's default keyboard and mouse configuration has the Block command bound to the middle mouse button. That would be fine except Fable: The Lost Chapters does not work with my Logitech MX500 series mouse's extra buttons. I had to go into options and remap the block command.

FYI: The default key for Target Lock is the space bar. I moved that to the B key and mapped Block to the space bar instead. This worked fairly well as a workaround for me as I could use my thumb for blocking and still have full use of the WASD keys for movement.

There are a couple of other minor issues with the game and a review wouldn't be complete without at least a little nitpicking. An odd video glitch crept up occasionally, displaying a string of arcane letters across near the bottom of the screen. After marrying a man, the game continued to annoyingly refer to him as a wife.

The game is also short. Even with the additional content added for the PC version, and even if you spend a bunch of time fiddling with all the optional content, you can easily finish the game in less than 15 hours. I'm not sure this is a terribly bad thing, to be honest. When I completed the quest that served as the final quest in the XBox version of the game, it felt very much like the end of the game. And then the game went on. The additional content is almost like a small expansion and it feels somewhat tacked on, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.

I like a game that keeps its story going and doesn't meander as so many RPG’s tend to do. I also like a game that offers a lot of freedom to play my character the way I want. I've played games before that let me play as an evil character, but I could never really get the hang of it. Fable: The Lost Chapters really helped me to realize my own capacity for evil. Yeah, at first my idea of 'evil' was running around punching people for no reason. Rather more annoying than evil. Soon, though, I graduated to true evilness and eventually became a complete psychopath. Oh did the villagers fear me. I was especially impressed with how much even the main story quests allowed me to explore the darkness within my soul. I can't bring myself to spoil any of the story, but some of the choices the game let me make were deliciously cruel.

The game is not perfect, but it was a very satisfying experience for me. I'm playing through it again now as a good character and I'm having just as much fun. Ultimately, two plays through will probably be enough for a while, but this is a game that I could see myself coming back to somewhere down the road. It will make for a brief, but enjoyable diversion for anyone who likes action RPG’s.