Two Worlds Review

Every so often, you get games like Oblivion that totally blow you away in terms of their enormous size and full interaction with the environment. A game where everything can be used or at least collected and rearranged your way (i.e. throwing bowls across the room). Then, you get games that try and match up to the success of a similar game, saying it is a bigger and better experience. In this instance, you get Two Worlds. It is true however, that Two Worlds is a huge game. There is no doubt about that claim. It may not be as big as Oblivion, but still will take about an hour to go from one end to the other merely on foot.

Yet, Two Worlds is by no means better than Oblivion. I must admit that I was anticipating this game for sometime, only to be greatly disappointed by the result. You would think that after four delays or so, that you would have a fine tuned and complete game. Yet, Two Worlds, like my old car, needs a lot of retooling back in the shop.

At first glance, Two Worlds looks pretty good. The environments are very well detailed and there is little fogging at all in the distance. The landscape even changes from lush forest, to grasslands, to snowy mountains, to even a desert. With how amazing the land is laid out, it’s such a pity the frame rate does not hold well at all. Most of the time, you will be chugging along because Two Worlds is trying to load up the land in front of you. It even does this when you just turn around sometimes. It really gets on your nerves and you may be more frustrated by this than you will by actually enjoying the game. What is even worse is that the menus are little help to you at all. You will struggle in the quest menu because you really can not read the information on the screen because it is too small and becomes too fuzzy against the background. Trust me, its not my personal vision that is the problem.

Character models are extremely simple and rival that of the previous generation of gaming. Yet when it comes to the different armor pieces and weaponry, you can see that there was a lot of time being put into making each piece stand out and look different from each other. These parts of your character are very well detailed, which make for some interesting combinations of armor that look fantastic when compared to everyone else in the world. The extra mile was taken to ensure that each armor piece and weapon is distinguishable, yet the frame rate really kills the enjoyment of all this and is completely unacceptable.

On the outer edge of Two Worlds, the score is fantastic and rivals the mood that Oblivion tried to set from the beginning. Take a closer look, however, and you will see that there really is not anything else worth hearing in this game. The voice acting is not that well done and drags on for entirely too long during cut scenes. Your character talks, which is a change from most RPGs, but is just as poorly portrayed as every other character in the game. Basic combat sounds and environmental ambiance is not that bad, but not nearly as well done as Oblivion.

Two Worlds’ combat system is very simple at best. You will mostly be button mashing your attack button the whole time with little variety. You can dual wield weapons, but it is still controlled by the same button. The archery was poorly designed as well, and you will find it most difficult to hit just about anything. What is worse is that there is no true blocking system at all. Early on in the game, you will be throwing your controller in disgust because you will constantly die against the easiest of creatures without being able to block them. There is a button that allows you to jump back, but it pulls you too far away from the fight to hit your enemy. You basically just have to rely on your armor and block attribute to save you.

There are many different types of abilities that you can learn and level up multiple times. You will learn different skills including magic types, improved weapon skills, stealing, horse riding, swimming, etc. A good deal of your abilities like swimming and two handed fighting are always active for when your character needs them, but there are other abilities that can be macroed to your hot bar that you can activate to help your character in combat. These types of abilities include magic, berserk, sneak, steal, etc. All of these abilities can be leveled up and improve your chances at performing them. This makes your character very customizable, but you do have to buy the abilities you don’t have from trainers, which can be extremely costly.

The influence system in the game plays out almost identical to the system in Fable. If you are a hero and do good things in the world, people will react to you as their savior. Yet, if you are evil by stealing or slaying the innocent, the people will cower in fear from you and guards may even try and chase you out of town.

Two Worlds does offer multiplayer on both the PC and Xbox 360. You can create two different types of characters: an arena character or RPG character. The arena character is used for games such as PvP, Monster Hunt, Horse Racing, and Horse Stealing (CTF). The RPG character allows you and 8 friends to roam the huge world, but it is broken up into different parts and given difficulty level. So no, the whole world isn’t available to you and your friends all at once, instead you are treated with invisible walls that say you can’t venture any further into the world. Even with the map broken down as much as it is, the game online is still just as glitchy as the single player experience. Add that with lag and you are in for a rather frustrating time. Leveling up your character online is fun with the party system, but it could have been much better.

Overall, Two Worlds will last you around 100 hours if you complete everything in the game. It’s not necessarily a bad game, it just has a lot of bugs and shortfalls that make the game not nearly as fun to play. Added multiplayer options are a bonus, but are brought down worse than the single player with lag and the poor frame rate. If you are looking for an Oblivion clone to keep you busy, Two Worlds will definitely do that. The story is pretty good to follow and there is a lot to do in the world. You may just become too frustrated with the bugs to even care about it for too long.