In two-player cooperative battles, not much changes except that you can use slightly more advanced strategies like having one player take point with melee attacks while the other stands back hurling spells and firing their gun. Combos and attack chains seem to grow organically, fluidly building over each successive hit, but this really only seems to apply to melee attacks. Shooting and casting spells seem to be fairly static exercises, where you basically are just standing still, as opposed to the slinking dance of melee combat.

Even if you are playing all by yourself, however, you can still take advantage of a kind of cooperative play thanks to your dog. If you manage to knock an opponent to the ground, your canine companion will rush to savage the fallen foe, effectively removing them from the battle and enabling you to focus on the enemies that are still standing. Your dog is not always successful in this endeavor, as some enemies seem to regain their footing faster than others, but the moments when your pet manages to harass or otherwise bloody a downed opponent make for some rewarding animations as your dog shakes their neck like an unfortunate chew toy.

Talk the Talk

Among the lush green fields of a town called Oakfield, we discovered a farm community full of NPCs just waiting to be aggravated. Each person that you encounter is an individual with their own specific likes and dislikes. Chatting people up is therefore a bit more nuanced than simply beating folk to the ground, because the tiered expression system has a wide selection of emotive options. Any one of these options can be extended by pressing and holding the A button, which causes a semi-circular meter to appear above your head as you caper and carouse. This meter slowly diminishes while a dot bounces from either side of its original extents, so releasing the A button at the right moment to cause the most emotional impact becomes more and more difficult.

Of course, deciding how to approach a townsperson is made easier by the "Who are you?" expression which gives you a detailed list of that individual's likes, dislikes and sexual orientation (useful when choosing who to flirt with, for example). Care must be taken when bringing amorous emotes to bear on any given person though. Flirt with someone that's not into your gender and they might just laugh it off, but flirt with a child and any bystanders that notice will undoubtedly run off to get the guards. Granted, there are plenty of ways that you can piss people off enough to run and get the guards (threatening them with your sword is a good one) that won't make you feel disgusted with yourself.

Housing Market

Every building in the game is purchasable, but the cost fluctuates with the town's economy. Consequently, a house could be exorbitantly expensive when you first visit it, but this price can be influenced by tinkering with the economy of the town or messing with the house itself.

For example, you could buy a local shop and drive the prices up by marking up items sold in that store to ridiculous levels. People in that town will suffer under your gouging and become poorer, which in turn affects the overall economy of the town and has the benefit of lining your pockets with all of the gold they used to save at the shop before your cruel regime took over. Buying a shop costs money though, so if you want to lower the price of a house the good old-fashioned way, you could just trash it by breaking in and busting out windows, stealing things (which also gives you evil points that affect your reputation) or killing the owner (which gives you a lot of evil points if anyone finds out about it).

Now, the trouble with most of those options is that they all seem sort of mean and indeed most of them will reward you with hefty amounts of evil points that eventually begin to show up on your character in unexpected ways. If you don't want to become an evil despot that crushes any poor peasants that get in your way, you'll have to earn the gold to buy houses by working. Employment opportunities abound in Fable II and you could quickly earn some scratch by becoming a barman at the local pub or shoeing horses as the town blacksmith. As mentioned before, you could purchase a shop and reap the benefits honestly by charging people fair prices instead of manipulating the hay market and impoverishing everyone. You can earn lots of money by buying real estate and renting it out, but this requires a fairly intimidating outlay of venture capital.

Then there's gambling, which Fable II seems to consider as a legitimate form of employment. While not a guaranteed source of income by any means, you can at least get a head start on growing your nest egg by playing Fable II Pub Games over XBLA right now.

With only a couple of months left before Fable II hits store shelves in mid-October, the underlying systems that allow for variegated gameplay all seem to be in place. Although combat still appears to have some issues with choppiness, it's nothing that a bit of optimization couldn't clean up, at least in the small skirmishes of a half-dozen brawlers that we participated in. At this rate, Fable II just might live up to its developers' lofty claims after all.

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The economics on this game seems to be pretty damn deep.  Awesome.