Regardless as to whether you think Fable: The Journey is the right direction for Lionhead’s much-revered franchise, or whether you’re holding out for Fable 4 on next-gen hardware, Fable Heroes is a side project that deserves to be treated on its own merits rather than as part of the main-line canon. It’s neither an entry into the overarching storyline, nor a spin-off that elaborates on the wider universe of characters. Instead, it takes the series into relatively uncharted territory, building its core premise around a downloadable co-operative beat-em-up with a familiar level of visual whimsy.

The style that the Heroes development team has shot for is that of a puppet theatre; and one that would fit right in amongst the marketplaces of Bowerstone or a travelling carnival wagon roaming the highways of Albion. If you can imagineLittleBigPlanet’s home-made buttons and shreds of cloth filtered through a slightly comic-book styled view of the Fable Universe then you‘ll be roughly there, with the sackboy-esque avatars running around levels that are culled from the most famous locations in the whole series - from Mistpeak mountains to the dry sand and stone of Aurora.

It’s filled with whimsy

To begin with you’re offered a selection of four puppets with wildly different combat styles, ranging from the iconic sword-swinging Hero through to the distanced gunplay preferred by the likes of Reaver. As you play, more of Albion’s finest will become available for selection, with a wide roster of characters included from all three titles. Each of them can be upgraded individually with new abilities, flourishes and visual customisations, with much of Heroes long-term value hinging on building up a cast of favourites and hammering out high scores on the leaderboards.

The main campaign mode is broken up into individual levels, each representing an iconic area of Albion and accessed via a Mario-style world map that flips into a ‘dark’ version once you’ve navigated through to the (playable) credits. In each stage, your band of four protagonists is tasked with battling a range of foes to collect coins and earn dice rolls for a between-level board game that rewards character perks, with a combat multiplier meter juicing up the action and encouraging people to stay on the offensive. Every strike earns you money, but each vanquished foe also drops a set amount of loot onto the ground, ensuring a competitive element that sees players fighting to collect coins for a podium finish and that all-important extra shot at a character upgrade.

The puppet theatre is well-realised

Whether you’re fighting against the Hobbs, Hollow Men or Clockwork machinations dreamed up by Lionhead’s developers, Heroes combat flow is roughly akin to the very same systems in the mainstream titles - which is no surprise considering the Fable engine is being put through its paces here. Light and strong attacks can be mixed with an area-of-effect damager that quickly racks up the multiplier count at the cost of a chunk of health, and it’s topped off with the ability to roll around the battlefield to escape the heavy attacks bestowed on boss characters and the occasional mid-level annoyance.

As you might expect from Fable-branded combat then, it’s all a bit lightweight and perhaps a little too ‘floaty’ for those of you weened on the best the genre has to offer, but Heroes is certainly not without its charms and challenges. Racking up a chain of kills and dashing from one area to the next to maintain that all-important multiplier is excellent fun in the short 10-15 minute cycles that each stage throws at you, and the mini-games and boss battles (accessed through a separate fork in each level, to encourage replayability) are decent enough diversions to keep things fresh for the 4-5 hours it takes to view the majority of content. There are even throwaway references to Street Fighter 2’s car-smashing between-bout diversions, with giant toadstools and other Fable ephemera replacing the four-door saloon.

It’s also undoubtedly an experience that comes into its own when you’re teaming up in multiplayer, and if you’re at all determined to play through it, I’d resolutely recommend that you find a bunch of chums to do so. Singleplayer quickly becomes monotonous once you’ve run through both the light and dark realms, but with a group of three or four players (offline and online co-op is fully supported), Heroes elevates itself to the state of a score-intensive game that promotes the best aspects of rivalry and team play. There are balance issues that inevitably stem from the random dice rolls of the upgrade system (the multiplier increases in particular determine players that can easily pull ahead), but once your cast is near fully upgraded, the playing field levels itself nicely.

Roll for character perks

Fable Heroes is not without its technical limitations however, and some of them are certainly worthy of a mention. The camera (tricky to master in any game that allows four players to roam as they like) is particularly bad on some stages, with players frequently getting stuck off-screen or simply not able to figure out where they should be. Compounding that are visuals that get incredibly busy from time to time, making it difficult to even tell whereabouts your character is amidst the carnage. The menus and main interface can also be strangely laggy, with the frame rate noticeably dipping from moment to moment dependant on how busy the action gets.

They’re noticeable caveats then but fortunately none of them are truly game-breaking, and at 800 points, if you’re in the market for a game that’ll keep a gaggle of sofa-bound friends happy for an afternoon, it’s hard not to recommend that you give Fable Heroes a try. It might not have the longevity of a full action-RPG or the combat depth of the best side-scrolling beat-em-ups, but the balance that Lionhead has struck between accessibility and quick 10-15 minute bursts of fun is hard to resist. Any level of player can get involved and contribute to the carnage, and there’s just enough depth to keep the hardcore entertained until their skill tree is fully explored.

There’s not much more to it than that, but then, does there really need to be?

Best Game Moment: Maxing out your multiplier and raking in the gold.