Fable Heroes PAX East 2012 Preview April 10, 2012

While at PAX East this year, I was fortunate enough to be checking out the Xbox booth while a game of Fable Heroes was being set up.  The people demoing the game were in need of four players, and I was more than happy to take a controller and give it a look.  I had never played a Fable game before, but I was quite familiar with the game series.  In fact, I even previewed Fable: Legends at E3 last year, and I was excited to see just what was in store with this new game.

I have to admit, this game was a lot of fun to play.  We set up a four player game with four controllers on the same Xbox 360, but the technician promised us that four player multiplayer would also be available through Xbox Live.

At the beginning of our game, all four of us chose from a preset selection of characters.  The appearance reminded me a lot of handmade puppets, which gave the game a fun aesthetic charm.  The level design reminded me of bright sets, not dissimilar to what you would see in a puppet show.

The controls were as follows.  The game featured a light attack, heavy attack which was slower but did more damage, and a powerful area attack, which was great for if you ever got swarmed, but cost you life.  There was also a dedicated button which changed the expression on your character’s face.

The level loaded up and we suddenly were a bunch of puppets inside of a giant puppet stage.  With enemies swarming all around us, the other players and I hacked and slashed our way through.  With the area attack button costing life, it added some strategy to the typical fight.  Enemies would drop gold and hearts, and the game did keep the scores of all the players to be tallied at the end of the level.

As we progressed through the level we reached some chests.  The chests offered some pretty awesome power ups which gave a jolt to the gameplay.  The first power up I received was one that made my character enormous, which allowed me to do much more damaging attacks (and be much bigger than the other players) at a cost of speed.  I also saw someone get the opposite power up of that, which made them very small, but the developer assured them that their attacks and movement was now much faster than normal, but their attacks were not as damaging.  However, not all chests are full of rewards.  Chests can also turn on you and become an enemy when you activate them, so be cautious.

As the level ended we reached a fork in our path and the technician told us that one path lead to a minigame, and the other lead to a boss fight.  Well, didn’t have to tell us twice, we were doing to do the boss fight.  The boss was pretty big, and only vulnerable at certain times, while quite capable of devastating attacks.  My fellow players died on several occasions during this fight.  In death, your character does not truly die, but becomes a ghost which can be revived upon collecting a heart piece.  As we defeated the boss, the level came to an end.

The technician promised me that Fable Heroes was going to make use of some exciting new features.  It would have some integration with the upcoming Fable game for the Kinect, Fable Legends.  It’s also going to be the first Xbox Live Arcade game to offer 400 Achievement Points, double what a current Xbox Live Arcade game currently offers.

Fable Heroes is expected to release exclusive to Xbox Live Arcade for the price of 800 Microsoft Points.