Just inside the Exhibition Hall, tucked away to the left, were two console displays exhibiting Lionhead Studio’s upcoming title, Fable II. It was easy to miss, and I only had to wait a minute or two to have my own hands-on experience with the sequel to a game I had loved playing for far too many hours.

The demo put me in a place called the Wraithmarch, an area about 7 hours of play into the game itself. I was playing with another PAX-goer in the game’s co-op play mode. Coordinating actions is a fairly simple affair, and while I didn’t see any of the cinematic kill sequences the developer journals have alluded to, there were opportunities to check out the melee, ranged, and magical attacks.

The framerate was pretty shitty, especially when both the hero and the henchman waded into an onslaught of enemies with swords drawn. Hopefully that’s something that will be fixed before the game itself comes out in a few months, because it turned a fun two-person charge into a glitchy “Thriller” approach. Despite that, the combat system is pretty intuitive at a basic level. The helpful Lionhead booth chap, after watching me and the PAXer to my left carve through skeletons for a while, informed us that while it was all well and good to leap in smashing the X button, we were missing the opportunity to fight with style.

Special melee attacks are executed by using a bit of X-holding and left analog stick pushing, but it doesn’t seem like you can move while you’re winding up for a big sword-sweep or a bladed uppercut, which is a shame.

During combat, the hero’s dog - the dog Peter Molyneux wants you to love - will leap on fallen enemies and worry their limbs in his jaws like a bone. He’ll also charge ahead and snarl at upcoming threats. There was a rubber ball hidden in a treasure chest along the path in the demo, and throwing it for your pooch resulted in a pleasant bit of non-combat interaction and happy tail-wagging. He looked something like a Doberman, a good match for the beefy, shirtless hero the demo portrayed.

The spell system is also intuitive, accessible through an icon-based menu with an aesthetically appealing look. Casting spells is simple, but you can reap more effective attacks by adjusting your area of attack - a new, and very useful feature not seen in the first Fable.

The look of the game itself is almost identical to what we saw in the first Fable, with its fantasy feel touched with a bit of colonial spice in the flintlocks and, presumably, the towns. The Wraithmarch I was limited to was a misty, gloomy forest area populated by skeletal creatures that popped up out of the ground to meet their second demise by sword, gun, or a fireball blast.

The PAXer next to me told me that the sound was something to be appreciated, replete with rattling bones and atmospheric nuance, but a nearby demo of Rayman: Raving Rabbids blasting “Jungle Boogie” deprived me of that pleasure. I’ll just have to trust that helpfully informative PAX-going NPC.

In truth, the demo itself was mediocre because it didn’t showcase any of the things that make Fable exciting to me: the social interaction options, the non-combat abilities and uses of your pet dog, and the long-term visual effects of your moral choices on your character. Of course, in a short demo those things are difficult if not impossible to showcase, and the developer journals on Lionhead’s website have been feeding that craving for peeks of that nature admirably.

If anything, the hands-on affirmed my suspicion that the game will be playable and it will be enjoyable, and that the co-op mode will kick up the Fable experience a notch in the fun department.