At first glance, Two Worlds seems like a copy of Oblivion, but once you get down to it, there are differences.
The game first starts with you creating your character. You can choose hair style, hair color, eye color, and then it goes into a whole bunch of customizations for facial features and body proportions. There are only 4 or 5 different hairstyles though, which is kind of a bummer, but there are probably more in the full version. You can only be a human male, but as I understand it, that part is required for the story line to flow correctly.
After creating your character, you're loaded onto a hill side without a real tutorial of how to play. Again I'm assuming that the full version would have some type of tutorial because it was a little disorienting at first, however it wasn't extremely difficult to pick up on the controls.
As far as first impression visuals go, you're expecting Oblivion and what you get is definitely NOT Oblivion. Oblivion has a washed-over, soft graphical look to it. Everything is very lush and flowing and all that gorgeous beauty-ness. Two Worlds is the opposite. Instead of being lush and soft, it is stark and crisp. It takes a moment to realize just how detailed it actually is. Especially if you're used to Oblivion, the game is going to look crappy until you realize its different.
Once you get used to the graphical system, you see that it tries for a realistic approach instead of a perfect fantasy landscape. You can still look around for miles and see lots of stuff. Everything has realistic shadows, and most NPCs are well textured. The highlight of the graphics comes in the mini-cutscenes with each interaction with an NPC. The background goes to a straight up CG background instead of a game-engine one and couple that with the close up character models and you get a pretty damn good picture. However there is still room for improvement and it could be sharper.
When I played I had everything up on high and the resolution to 1200x800 with anti-aliasing at 4 and I didn't experience any frame rate issues, even near the water. Speaking of which, the water boasts a realistc reflection and, get this, there is CURRENT to it. That means if you're swimming, you need to aim further up than where you want to land to swim straight across. I was blown away by this. I started to cross the lake and realized i was going sideways. So i stopped swimming, and sure enough, the cross-current was pulling me down river. This makes sense though, considering the game had me install extra physics software before I could play.
As far as audio goes, Two Worlds definitely hits the mark. In previews its said they brought in over 200 diffrent voice actors for the game. And in the short hour that I played, interacting with about 20 odd characters never yielded the same voice. Plus your character has a voice too! It still has a conversation system similar to Oblivion, except your character will occassionaly talk depending on the event.
The plot line seems to present a decent story too. An ancient power has vanished and The Dark Brotherhood is going to try and find it for its own uses. You and your sister are the only two people left who are able to touch a relic that would reawaken this power though, so they kidnap your sister to get you to cooperate. You then search for the missing pieces of the relic and bring them together to try to free your sister. From what I understand though, thats not even half the game. It really is supposed to start to pick up after you've made the choice to reawaken the power or not. Kinda brings in the classic good/evil choices that develop your character, whom is also highly customizable.
Your character has a bunch of different skill sets as well as magic schools that he can use. In the demo you start out with a fire spell and a healing spell, but you can advance later to water, earth, air, necromancy, and lightning as well. Thankfully you can pick up any weapon and use it, you don't have to learn each weapon skill. However, you must meet the requirements for that weapon, such as a certain dextarity, strength, level, etc. Gaining levels is also relatively easy. From killing each creature you gain XP, though its not displayed onscreen, you can track it in your character window.
So its diffrent from Oblivion in that you don't have a core set of skills which then improve your over-all level. Your basic stats for improvement are health, dexterity, strength, and willpower. Just four. These control your HP, ability to use weapons, damage, and MP/spell abilities respectively. Each level up you also get a few talent points to put into skills such as leveling up fire magic, or your block chance, etc.
The combat system is real time, just as in Oblivion, so you can play however you want. You can stick to melee or magic, or ranged, though the ranged attacks seemed to be the least developed of the three. The enemy's health bar is shown in the top center of the screen and your target is represented by a targeting reticule.
The overall difficulty (on medium, the default) wasn't too bad. About what you would expect from an RPG. However it did seem easy to encounter extremely powerful foes without warning (i.e. the grizzly bears that kill you in one hit, even at level 6). It can be tricky when facing multiple enemies, but simply run out of their attack range and they don't pose a problem.
Dying also was not a big deal. You simply respawn at the closest health fountain. No penalties or equipment damage or anything, which is nice, but at the same time you can endlessly throw yourself at something until its defeated, because the enemy's health doesn't shoot back up right away. Thats another thing, there are health and mana fountains all over the map. And the map is GIGANTIC! Definitely an Oblivion scale map, though not neccessarily as big.
Overall Two Worlds is a great game. Those that aren't hardcore RPGers may not like it, as it can be more difficult to pick up than other games. However once you get going, by only having 4 areas to upgrade, its really fun and easy to get a character you want instead of maybe regretting not investing in one area or the other. The visuals are solid once you take-off the Oblivion blinders we've all been accustomed to. The difference is like that between WoW and LoTRO. WoW is a fantasy landscape, where is LoTRO is more realistic looking. Same difference here, Oblivion is more fantasy-esque while Two Worlds is more real. Audio is superb, as the voice-overs are definitely first rate. And the gameplay in general is fun. If you've played Oblivion and loved it, chances are you'll love this new adventure.