This review will be covering the multiplayer side of things, check single-player out here.

So, last night LorD and I spent a good hour or so playing Fable II co-op via Live and the least I can say is that it's... tricky.

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The concept of the idea is brilliant, teaming up with a friend and either saving Albion, wreaking havoc or just getting pissed in one of the various pubs. It's a great idea but it just hasn't been pulled off correctly.

The first thing that irritated me was that you couldn't play as your hero in someone else’s world. Now surely that's what playing co-op is about, is it not? Instead you've got a selection of six 'henchman' to play as, all with a preset look. But it's not all bad, as you can actually import your current character(s) skills, and you then get to choose the appropriate starting weapons for your henchmen. For example I chose my character whose mastered 'strength' and 'skill' so I got to choose top-end weapons to start with.

While the second player is customizing their henchman, player one can modify how the gold and experience is split. It uses a slider bar with 0% at one end and 100% at the other, I'm sure you get the gist...

Once everything is finalised you will then be transported into Albion!

Once we got into Albion we arrived in Bowerstone and everything else acts as single-player, meaning you can do pretty much anything you could do in single-player, so you can help your friend out with quests and what-not. As with many things it's up to player one(the hero) to lead and it's pretty much under their control to decide where you go and to gather the XP. Also, if you're taking part in an evil quest such as taking villagers to slave camps then the hero will generate the evil renown points whereas the henchman won't take any back to single-player. As I played with LorD, who was quite evil, I got to use his expressions he'd earned throughout his nastiness, which I found great seeing as I hadn't seen these as my character is good. So, I devoted a good twenty minutes trying out these bad expressions like the vulgar thrust on LorD's dog. He loved it.

The bad thing about co-op that I'm sure a lot would agree is that of the camera. It's dreadful. The camera is shared between the two players and it can get quite cramped and can take the 'experience' away. For example, my character is a skill character, so I use the special ability quite a lot, which is where you can look down the gun and dismember enemies. You can still dismember enemies in co-op but as the screen is shared you can't look down the gun and it was a bit of a shitter for me as I love doing that. Another bad point is that it can get quite awkward when moving through the different areas of Albion, especially with lag, you'll be running all over the show and player two could be constantly teleporting back to player one because of this. It happened to us a few times.

Anyway, all in all, it's very enjoyable.

Compared with other co-op games, I'll rate multiplayer:

72%

Bit frustrating but a good laugh.