An entertaining game despite some real flaws. Pick it up if you like Old School RPGs, and if the price has dropped.
I can't recommend buying the game at its original price point of $50, or the Xbox 360 version at $60, but at $20 Two Worlds for the PC can ACTUALLY be a FUN game. Yes, it has plenty of flaws, but I found myself engrossed in it despite the problems. Maybe I'm a masochist, but I've had fun with flawed titles in the RPG genre before (anyone remember 'Soulbringer' [2000] and 'Summoner' [2001] ?!) and this game is another entry.
I have to agree with the reviewers who liken this game more to the "Gothic" series on the PC than TES: Oblivion. It's not designed to be as accessible to the player as Bethesda's title. Two Worlds is very much an Old School RPG, with no parallel leveling between the player, his equipment, and adversaries. You will indeed spend the first 5 – 6 hrs of the game running, like a chicken with its head cut off, from humble boars and wolves. You'll find that most of the weapons and spells you collect in the early stages of the game will have to sit in your inventory because you are too low on the feeding chain to use them. You'll discover that more than a few quests are simply too hard to complete until you achieve higher levels, but you can't determine this until you actually try to take on an Ogre and find yourself snuffed in one blow.
If you're patient and have a sense of humor, the game does become more rewarding despite its flaws and quirks. But be warned you'll need to suffer all kinds of indignities for the first 5 or so hours. After that you rapidly become a lean, mean, killing machine and you can slice and dice your way thru most encounters. The gameworld opens up, the quests become more fun, and the vast array of weapons and armor become much more gratifying to use.
The other reviews here give a good overall picture of the game; I will just add my own thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of Two Worlds.
Strengths:
-no load screens after first loading the game (there are brief delays of a few seconds in-game while a new level is loaded; all you'll notice is a small CD icon popping up in the lower left corner of your game screen). The long load times (that draw complaints in Bioshock and The Witcher) are utterly absent here.
- interactions with merchants don't require laborious skill point allocations, they have no limits on the amount they can spend to buy items from you, and the pricing you see, is the pricing you get - no maneuvering slider bars to try and eke a few more sheckels from their tight fists, or spending 3 hrs searching for the lone talking Mudcrab on an island in the middle of nowhere that pays full price for items. Every village has at least one merchant , and they are willing to buy everything in your inventory.
-a bit of careful maneuvering can often induce different groups of enemies to fight each other while you stand back and watch the carnage and then pick off survivors.
-after the initial 5 – 6 hrs of grinding, leveling comes more rapidly. Lots of skill areas to exploit (although many are rather ineffectual) and you can pay gold to have them reallocated if you are unhappy with the direction your avatar is taking.
-alchemy is a simple click and drag matter; no need for retorts and alembics in your inventory or periodic conferences with Trainers. Some cool potions (some with permanent effects to stats) can be assembled simply by stopping to pick up the right plants while on your journeys.
-there's an autosave option, and when you are killed you spawn at one of many shrines (akin to Bioshock – style Vita-Chambers), with all your stats and gear intact.
-some of the levels and maps are quite striking and show what could have been achieved with more dev time.
-Two Worlds was made by a Polish dev team that in all likelihood didn't have 200+ people devoted to the game (like Bethesda had for Oblivion). Two Worlds was rushed out to meet a ship date and needed another three months of work before release, but I am willing to bet Reality Pump's next game will be a very good one.
Weaknesses:
-even with the 1.6 patch the horseback riding is an exercise in utter wonkiness - tried once and gave up permanently thereafter.
-graphics remain mediocre, with major hitching and framerate drops turning even simple movements, such as running down a trail, into an eyeball-wearying exercise in Poor Coding. The first-person POV is so bad that you can't use it and must rely on the third-person POV, which gets to be very annoying for identifying NPCs when there are more than a 1 or 2 of them onscreen.
-Numerous small glitches indicate inadequate QA / QC and Playtesting.
-the dev team failed to recognize that the Cliff Racer Effect -- placing bunches of wild animals or bandits or goblins for every 15 yards of trail – becomes very annoying after the first 10 minutes of playing the game.
-the onscreen minimap is so small as to be useless, and the main map lacks the easy interactivity necessary for such a large and open-ended game space.
-melee combat is a simple clickfest. Archery and ranged spellcasting are basically useless after the first strike, because the game's combat design almost always sends large numbers of enemies mobbing at you, and you have to stand still to use ranged attacks.
-stealth gameplay (sneaking, backstabbing, lockpicking) comparatively underdeveloped and not worth more than a few skill point allocations.
-overall, the game lacks what the professional gaming media reviewers term 'polish'.