It’s not a great game by any means but if you give it a try, it might surprise you in some areas.
The Ugly:
Before the game even starts, you get to create your character from a limited amount of choices. This isn’t Oblivion’s character creation process but at least they give you some options. After that you’re greeted with a quite lengthy intro cutscene that begins the story and sets the stage for the adventure to come. During this cutscene I noticed three things; 1. The character you design isn’t the character you’ll be seeing in the cutscenes, instead you will see a leather clad guy with a goatee. 2. The voice acting ranges from pretty good to pretty laughable with your character’s voice being the clichéd deep raspy hero voice and 3. Your sister’s name has two spellings during the course of the game.
So some people might give up on the game once they hear the cheesy voices, see the misspelled words and the cutscene stuntman but I pressed on. When the actual gameplay begins, you’re treated to a very short tutorial and set on your very first mission. It’s a quick and straightforward one so it’s not until you get outside that you run into Two World’s greatest problem… Frequent loading times. It’s not like they are long loading times and the world would be seamless without them unless you traverse to a dungeon, it’s just that they happen every minutes or so and they tend to pause the game a little bit. Oh and this pause also happens when you deal the finishing blow on an enemy.
Also this game is very console unfriendly. It’s almost as if the developers of this game were so pissed at how Oblivion catered to consoles that they decided to do the exact opposite. The menus are horrid in both layout and use with a controller, and the map and quest log is an adventure all itself. The map Is so small and killed with blurry little marks that it’s hard to tell what’s what and the quest log seems to have a mind of its own. It honestly took me a good 10 – 15 minutes just to figure out how to navigate these menus to get a little bit of use out of them.
The Bad:
So are you still following me? Good, because I kept pressing on too. Here’s where the big mistakes end and my minor gripes come in. For the most part the game looked good. You can see miles into the distance and the landscape is truly beautiful. The rain effects look like they were done on the Xbox but the fog and thunderstorms are beautiful. The creature design is also of this hit or miss sort. All the mundane animals look right and so do the humans, goblins and things like that and I was kind of impressed by some of the other foes in the game. Zombies were given their own treatment and there were even these headless bondage freaks that were somewhat original. Reapers on the other hand were annoying and boring to look at. It’s almost as if a kangaroo, dinosaur and walrus were invited to an orgy.
For the most part the game has pretty good graphics. They’re not on par with Oblivion and the loading may make it seem that the game has framerate drops on the other hand the world is much more populated than Oblivion’s and the towns aren’t their own little loading worlds.
Combat is all hack and slash which isn’t too bad see as all the weapons and weapon combinations there are in the game. Daggers, all kinds of swords, clubs, pole arms, axes, hammers flails, if you can kill someone with it, it’s in this game. There is a manual dodge button that makes your hero get out of harm’s way and this button is usually essential for survival. Finally there are bows, bombs, traps and magic. I’ll talk about bows and magic later because they are actually fun to use.
While combat seems simple, the game is unbelievably hard when you first start out. The world is very unforgiving and a simple pack of wolves can have you resurrecting at the nearest shrine. I didn’t have a problem with the difficulty; it was the shrines that ended up being big flaws in the combat. If ever you were up against a creature that could wipe you out easily, your best bet would be to go to a magic shrine and just spam your most powerful spell while the shrine refills your mana, or fight a baddie by the life shrine and constantly get healed; if you die, you’ll start right in front of the guy. This system is easy to take advantage of and ensures that you’re never truly outgunned in this game.
The last of the complaints is a lack of lore or background reading materials. The game is large in scope and seems to have a rich history but most of that is untouched in the game. You’ll come across ruins filled with torture chambers and undead, yet no book or diary to say what the place was. Maybe the Elder Scrolls series spoiled me with their dozens of books but I feel this was something sorely missing from Two Worlds.
The Good:
With all the bad things out of the way now it’s on to the good things. I’ve mentioned little blurbs about them before but here’s where I’ll dedicate more time. The environment is vast and varied, running the gamut of frozen wastes to burn down cursed forests. Life is everywhere whether it is packs of wolves to woodcutter camps, bandit hideouts or orc war camps. I’ve seen other reviews complain about how wolves and bandits are everywhere but that’s only if you spend a lot of time in the north. The south has a race of insect creatures, golems, dragons wyverns, giants and reapers roaming everywhere with rarely a wolf or bandit in site. There’s a ton of creature variety and it you’re tired of seeing the same sites and foes over again, simply venture out in a new direction.
The classless character creation works well and gives you the freedom to create a character that’s great at combat or good at many things. While I’m usually picking a stealthy characters and I admit I can’t seem to get stealth to work in this game, I did venture out of my comfort zone and make a character that excels with a bow and necromancer magic. A very strange mix in RPG’s that usually doesn’t work out but is totally fine in this world.
Bow combat works in this game because of the speed and how versatile the modes of firing are. You can charge a shot to full power, there are even talents that let you over charge your shot and you can release for massive damage. The option is also there if you just want to fire off quick rounds at approaching targets. Magic works just as well as you can pick the 3 spells you want to use the most and then use upgrading cards to extend the spells duration, expand the power or reduce mana costs.
Speaking of customization, the things you can do to weapons and armor makes sure you’ll always have a something nice equipped. If you find two of the same items, you can simply combine them to form an item that is slightly better than the first. There are also gems you can find that attach elemental damage to weapons. So in my case, I found two swords that I really liked that were pretty powerful when I got them but would have become obsolete if I just kept them as is, but fortunately I kept snagging the same swords over and over and attaching gems to them to make them something that is useful 20 levels down the road.
My favorite part of the game was the variety of quests. Two Worlds is full of rival factions and while the reputation with these factions is never fully realized (the worst that happens if you piss off a group is that they don’t give you high level quests) the game sends you on a ton of different adventures purposely and accidentally. Helping out the hunted necromancers usually has surprising results as their seemingly simple missions turn into much more, these two warring families often have you hunting down people and sabotaging their opposition’s business or you can just clean up trade routes for merchants.
So the game is a no named developer’s first foray into the RPG world. As you can see it has a ton of issues that would make most people say this game is complete and utter trash not worth your time unfortunately it’s the best true RPG outing available on the 360 so I was able to find forgiveness in my heart and devote time into this game. It’s not a great game by any means but if you give it a try, it might surprise you in some areas.