This year has actually been amazing for Xbox first-party releases, with all of Forza Horizon 6, Halo: Campaign Evolved and Gears of War: E-Day knocking it out of the park in my opinion, but there's one first-party game that I've been looking forward to in particular, and that's the Playground Games reboot of Fable.

So, imagine my surprise when it was declared at the Xbox FanFest in London last week that Fable was actually playable! We immediately booked in a slot (which was a good job, because it was seemingly the most popular title at the show), and settled down for around 15 minutes with a specifically combat-focused part of the game.

You can actually see most of what we played in the IGN video up above, and the key thing to be clear about is that it's all part of one specific mission - in other words, it's the tiniest taste of what to expect from the full game. The idea here was to provide a sample of how combat works in terms of melee, magic and ranged attacks.

This was probably the best-case scenario for us, as combat was the biggest concern we had ahead of Fable's release next February. We were worried that it might feel quite soft and fluffy in motion, but we actually found that your actions have a lot of weight to them, and there's definitely a crunchy and kinetic feel to fighting in general.

For me personally, I noticed a resemblence to Hogwarts Legacy in Fable's combat, particularly in how your attacks flow from one enemy to the other - there's a lot of scope for chaining together momentum-based combos. Animations seem super slick for the most part, magic works really well and allows you to add variety in all sorts of ways, and the crossbow — while slightly forgettable — actually seems the most OP weapon as things stand.

There's also a parry system where the game slows down to indicate that you've hit the right timing window, although this seemed a little bit clunky and confusing at first glance. To be honest, 15 minutes isn't really enough to get the hang of all this, and it was only in the last five minutes that we started to feel like we could get into the flow of combat.

Outside of combat, I noted down a few observations, with the main one being that the game looked fantastic running at a smooth 60FPS. I never got a chance to find out whether it was being played on PC or an Xbox Series X, but I've seen people suggesting it was the latter - in any case, a 60FPS mode is confirmed for Series X at launch. IGN's build says it was a PC version on medium settings, but that might have been different in our case.

In this demo, you're accompanied by one of the main characters in the new Fable known as Humphrey, who's played by Peep Show star Matt King. Again, it's early days and we'll have to see how things pan out, but King does a great job at producing the laid-back, silly, humourous vibe that Fable is known for, all the while being involved in some pretty serious combat. It's impossible to gauge how the full game will feel, but this little snippet at least feels like a Fable game.

Both myself and Craig had a chance to play this demo last weekend, and we both came away pretty darn impressed with what we'd played. That said, we also remarked to each other that we wished we'd had a chance to explore Albion and interact with NPCs, which is something we'll have to wait a little bit longer for.

Not too long though! Fable will officially be with us in just four months' time in February 2027, and based on this small snippet along with all the footage we've seen so far, we reckon it's going to be an absolute mega-hit for Xbox and Playground Games. Let's hope so!

Are you liking what you've seen of Fable to date? Tell us down in the comments section below.