Seriously flawed combat, clumsy interface, repetitive encounters, empty characters. Feels false and not engaging.
Combat: I'll stop short of calling the combat "broken." It's not quite broken, but it is poor. It does not give you the direct control over the moves like Oblivion, which inserts your own control with your governing stats, bonuses and drawbacks. This alone is not enough to damn the combat of Two Worlds, for instance, KOTOR does not give direct control over every move, but programs moves into a queue. KOTOR's system worked, and gave a good feeling of combat between two opponents affected by weapons, stats and selected moves. Two Worlds seems like it attempted to cross these two types of systems into a hybrid, and ended up missing the mark entirely. Every fight (yes EVERY) in the 15 hours or so I've spent was reduced to constantly running away, turning to button mash, running away, turning to button mash, repeated over and over until either I or the opponents were dead. More often, I was the one dying, except one frustrating and ridiculous battle where I ran laps around a magic regenerator for a half hour constantly throwing dinky fireballs at a whole village full of "groms" until they were all dead. Also, half the time I didn't even know that bandits or wolves or little evil munchkin things were attacking me until I got nailed with an attack that kicked half my ass. The clear feeling of being in a place and engaging in a fight is missing. This brings me to the next point. Character progress: In the first 15 hours, it has been exceptionally difficult to win any fights at all (except the incredibly stupid battle aforementioned, running back and forth about 30 feet so I couldn't be caught by a whole village of monster things, using my one crappy spell for a half hour. Not fun.) Even the most constantly encountered enemies - wolves, bears, and bunnies - I cannot kill without doing the run-laps-and-throw-fireballs trick. When I'd encounter yet another band of wolves every other minute, I'd find myself yelling "NOT AGAIN" rather than happily gearing up for another fight. Oblivion, of course, uses a leveled system of opponents, so the challenge was usually an appropriate level of difficulty which you would need to devise an appropriate series of spells, weaponry and tactics to overcome - how to accomplish your goal would be up to you, and overcoming the challenges gives you options to improve your character's skills to aim for higher challenges as you progress. In the 15 hours I've spent on Two Worlds, I've been able to distribute a handful of new skill points on a variety of skills and attributes (like my stupid fireball!), which has increased the numeric value of things like the level of damage I can do with a sword or a staff. However, even though I see the number going up, every battle is still an exercise in repeated frustration. Maybe after a full 30 hours I would be able to finally take on those packs of wild boars which now tear me apart in 10 seconds flat, but I don't think I have the patience. Story: I don't know, something about my sister getting kidnapped and guys in hoods blackmailing me into running errands for them under threat of harming her. The whole thing is laid out in such awkward and silly dialog that it was hard not to laugh. I take that back - I'm pretty sure I did laugh. I almost want to hit the next little node on the map, which I have a hard time navigating, to advance the story but so far it's been so lame that it's hard to get motivated to do so. And the side quests so far are so lame (resulting in my ridiculous lap-running trick at the "grom" village) that there's no diversion. Obligatory comparison to Oblivion: Oblivion's story draws you in from the first moment with a conspiracy and the king's assassination right in front of you, interrupting your quiet time in jail with a secret mission to tell the king's bastard illegitimate son about his lineage and duty to start making plans to keep the hell dimension from spewing out any more murdering demons. THAT is a story. Map/menu interface: Clumsy, bordering on broken. The hotkey system was confusing, which is hard to believe. Some hotkeys can't be equipped together, and they're complimentary to one another, so they can't be on the same series of hotkeys together but if you equip one or a weapon that negates a certain hotkeyed ability, the other ability or weapon or spell or whatever will automatically appear in that slot. So you have to know what is complimentary to the other and what setup precludes what abilities. If that sounds to you like it sucks, you're right. Also, the inventory is just a big blob of pictures in a big window, with no names or anything on them. (Is this the right quiver of arrows? No, you need to use the big red one. No, the OTHER big red one.) The interface is counterintuitive, spell creation is not truly modular, and the quest screen/map is incredibly clumsy. Oblivion's map and quest menu make it clear what you could do, should do to accomplish whatever goal you're working on and what you've done and have accomplished. Two Worlds made it very confusing which goal would advance which storyline, and for me at least, using the map to try to figure out where I should go to accomplish any particular plot point was beyond frustrating. Sometimes I could figure out where to go to get something done (hopefully I won't encounter too many wolves or bears or, God forbid, evil bunnies on the way there) and other times I could only guess what the bizarrely shifting map screen was trying to tell me. Usually I was wrong. Multiplayer: The online multiplayer was what really attracted me to this game. These days, I usually won't buy a game if it doesn't have multiplayer because it won't hold its value or interest over a long period of time. Oblivion of course was the exception to this, and I thought a similar came that INCLUDES multiplayer was something promising. So far, the multiplayer has been entirely unplayable. Literally, one hit from another live player killed me instantly. He'd been playing constantly for a day and a half to level up. I have no idea how he managed to do that, because the lag has been crippling in every single game. Hitting my trigger to swing my staff resulted in a 3-second lag, every time I tried to swing it. Clearly, that makes it impossible to compete in any sort of combat, and even impossible to catch a damn bunny to even begin accumulating any experience to improve the character's chances. I've heard from other players that the problem is that all Live servers are currently in Europe, and it will be several days before an American server goes online. Because of this I will not write the multiplayer's epitaph quite yet; there still may be something promising in the future for this aspect, but I'm not optimistic. If the overall gaming experience is similar at all to the single player, I doubt it will be enough to make this game a keeper. Bottom line: I viewed this game as Oblivion with multiplayer, and that's why I bought it. I was dead wrong. This game is not an utter failure if you have the time and money, and you don't mind passing some time exploring a game world with a new story, different characters and new places (though I do find exploring to be frustrating when I get mauled by wolves every 10 seconds). If you haven't experienced Oblivion, buy that instead as it is a far better game in every respect. If you do have Oblivion, I think you'll have much more fun going back and tying up some uncompleted side quests or buying an expansion pack. With so many good looking games coming out in the next few weeks, this one will be the first one I sell back, and probably very soon. -Flopsy