It troubles me that in between DLC releases, I've barely revisited the world of Albion, and even though each elongated period of time between plays means I accrue cashola through my various business and real-estate investments, having so much money actually cheapens the experience (for the uninitiated, you still earn money in real-time, even while not playing the game).

What's equally vexing about this is, firing the game back up to play the latest DLC instalment, See the Future reaffirmed just why I haven't really come back to this lush, explorer-friendly game-world: it's still a broken experience due to technical imperfections.

So while the core mechanics of Fable II are as solid as ever, the game's tech just falls short of delivering an enjoyable experience or the game's clear design goal. Being locked to invisible walls or unable to vault certain fences is annoying – especially because the game encourages the archaeologist in all of us to emerge treasure-toting triumphant. And that's just two of many, many gripes. So why oh why haven't either of these updates included mechanic fixes to the game's engine?



Well, problematic gameplay system aside (it is still massively fun, just annoyingly so), See the Future sees our hero being summoned to a new stall in the Bowerstone Market (down by the docks). There you'll meet the stall's owner, Murgo (you may remember him from the childhood sequence of the chief game), a collector of rare antiquities, and a few of these appear to be cursed.

He asks you to take them for yourself (a Snow Globe and a Golden Skull), and doing so then requires you to only activate them from your inventory. The first item, the Snow Globe, whisks you away to a village where all the colour has been sucked out and its inhabitants restrained by creepy coloured statue-like creatures. There are three (blue, yellow and red), corresponding with your own face-button attacks (melee, ranged and magic), and you'll progressively explore the village, a dungeon under the village and then a temple of sorts, freeing the colourless village's denizens along the way until you've defeated the coloured baddies and turned the environment from greyscale into a pack of Derwent pencils.

The Skull, on the other hand, transports you to an undisclosed graveyard where you learn a hero has been trapped by an evil necromancer in the form of a skull statue. To release him from this state, you'll need to collect wisps that will only follow other undead spirits, so you'll need to don a Hollowman suit in order to fool them. Expanding on this idea then, to progress through the graveyard, you'll also need to impress a few statues to open gates, and to do this, you'll need to wear the same outfits as them (a Balverine and Hobbes cosy, respectively). Of course, the ‘Hero' turns out to be the actual Necromancer, and you're forced into a seminal boss battle (finally), before taking him out and lifting the curse on the Golden Skull.

The third item then offer you the actual glimpse at the future as so promised by the DLC title, but it's a bit of a let-down, and pretty much just stands as confirmation we'll be seeing a sequel to the game sometime in the future (and given how long it took to develop Fable II, that could be quite a while).

There are new items to grab though, and plenty of things exclusive to the content, such as face-paint and new items of clothing as well as new potions to change the breed of your dog. But it's not really enough to overly extend the game's life-cycle. There's a coliseum that appears which you can battle in and earn points, and the new Achievements are as creative as they were in the original, which is a good thing for Achievement junkies, but there's just not enough here to really feel like Lionhead have expanded the overall experience.

Which I guess was the point in making faithful players aware the team are likely already working on that inevitable sequel, so as to keep the faith. But by the time that game comes out, I'm sure most of us will probably own absolutely everything in Albion, making it difficult to go from riches to rags, so to speak.

The price is right with the content coming in at a measly 560 Microsoft Points, but don't go expecting an expanded experience such as that seen in Fallout 3's DLC – both Knothole Island and See the Future are essentially new dungeons that can be finished easily within around two hours each.