Two Worlds

"Two Worlds falls short on it's presentation, but once you get into it, the gameplay ain't that bad."

I love my RPGs, and as such, Two Worlds was almost essential. Im trying to experience as many RPGs on the Xbox 360 as possible, and fortunately my friend had Two Worlds, so I borrowed it. Whilst playing Two Worlds, I experienced a lot of frustration, but I had some fun also. Any RPG fan should be able to at least complete the game, since it isn't that bad, but the game has a lot of presentation flaws, rather than in the gameplay itself.

The story is pretty crap. You play as some guy who you can initially customise (the character model is so small when you do change his appearance you can't see what has changed) and of course, you're own custom name. The game then starts with him on a horse with some woman, your sister. The "hero" then checks a near building, seeing if it is suitable for shelter. Shock and horror, when he returns, his sister has disappeared, and so the hunt begins. We're then thrown into the future, where our hero is confronted. The plot is essentially about helping out some evil guys to save your sister. It's not really good in any way and quite rubbish, as is the ending. However, a bit like Oblivion, Two Worlds has some really interesting and well designed side-quests. Two Worlds does feature different factions, however, you're given slightly more freedom in side-quests, and many link together. They can be quite interesting, but a lot of them are the same: Go and find this person for me, and you can pretty much guarantee they will be dead. The main story is a poor attempt, but the side-quests (those not involving finding people) can have good variety, and a few of them are genuinely interesting.

If you don't already know, Two Worlds basically rips off Oblivion in almost all aspects. You're given a massive, fairly generic fantasy world (complete with different terrain areas), and off you go. You're told what story quest you can do, and that's that. However, in Two Worlds, it doesn't really help you much at all, instead it gives you barely indication as to what you can do. Whilst I prefer Morrowind over Oblivion for it's simplistic approach (ie, here, do this quest, or anything you want), it just doesn't work so well in Two Worlds. For starters, navigating the menu is absolutely terrible. The controls are really poor, and I never really understood what I could and couldn't do. The map was rubbish too. You had to use the D-PAD to navigate it, and you couldn't zoom out as to see more areas. Instead, it was fairly close in, and any major cities on the map weren't even marked. Whilst I believe a map IS provided with the game (my friend didn't give me that unfortunately) it's still tough to travel the lands when you don't really know where you're going. The game doesn't feature fast travel, however there are numerous teleport stations across the land, and I have to admit there were plenty of them in all of the major locations. Whilst apparently quests are marked onto your mini-map, I had no clue what to look for. On occasion some random green dot would appear, but I had no idea what it meant. I wasn't able to select a quest and be shown the location of where I had to go, rather, I was shown where I had already received it. As a result, quests could also be incredibly frustrating or confusing, a lot of details given in the dialogue were incredibly vague. The game apparently has different regions, however without an actual map, and of course, an unmaked in-game map, I had no idea where these areas were. Morrowind didn't give you a quest marker, but it's easier to navigate map really helped it, compared to the horrible map featured in Two Worlds. Again, this is all failure in presentation. The gameplay ain't that bad, as I shall explain.

Two Worlds is like any other fantasy RPG. You run around the massive world, doing quests and gaining EXP. Enemies give you EXP, as do quests, and loot. When you get enough EXP, you're given 5 points to spend on your four parameters (I think they were Vitality, Strength, Dexterity and Will Power), and a single skill point for you're skills. There are around 30 or so skills in Two Worlds. The majority of them you have to learn from teachers, but it costs. In my playthrough, every skill cost 10,000 gold, and absolutely absurd amount. I spent absolutely no gold throughout my entire playthrough of the game, getting up to level 50 by completing around 50-100 side-quests, I only had 180K gold. How the hell are you meant to get these skills? I still didn't have enough to buy them, and as a result, the only skill I brought was Necromancy. Enemies only drop between 50-500 gold, if any at all, and gold and EXP earned in quests is determined on your level (for example, a quest may give you 25 Experience PER player level, so the higher you are, the more EXP you get). How you're meant to get enough gold for these skills is beyond me. Apart from that, in the inventory system, things get a little more complicated. You have all of your classic equipment here, weapons, armour, rings and arrows. Equipping them is simple, and their stats are clearly shown. Another thing that I liked was that all of the weapons and armour could be used as much as I liked. I'm talking about durability. Why the hell can't I use my weapons as much as I like? I never understood why games introduce this system, and to be honest, I was quite pleased with Two Worlds that my weapons/armour would never break, and that my enchantments on weapons would never run out (Im looking at you Oblivion). Yeah, Two Worlds features A LOT of alchemy features. Whilst playing the game you will find loads of different coloured gems and alchemy ingredients. By hovering over the gems, you can assign an elemental stat to one of your weapons. For example, the green gem, when combined with my weapon, will add Poison damage to it. You can then continue to add Poison gems to that weapon, however you can't put any other element on it. This allows you to really power up your weapons (my main weapon had around 3K Poison damage, I simply used every poison gem I could find on it), and as mentioned before, the weapon has to charge, so you don't need to worry about it's elemental damage running out. Another pretty cool feature, is that you can also combine weapons and armour together. Have two swords that are the same? Combine them to increase their class and power. You can do this as many times as you want for anything, allowing you to, again, power-up your weapons. It's a really cool feature and well done, so props to the Two Worlds developers for having an interesting and unique feature, that actually works. Magic is done in a similar way to equipment. There are five different magic elements, each with their own spells, represented as cards. Some spells do require a high level skill in that element, and this can be done with the skill points you gain by leveling up (a skill can go all the way up to rank 15). You can then assign 3 cards to be equipped, and they can then be hot-keyed onto the D-PAD (pressing the button will simply equip the spell, a different button is used to cast it). You can also equip boosters onto these spells, which effectively improve your spells. Apart from that, you have all the other generic features, such as horse riding, a massive number of quests, and of course, combat. The combat isn't too bad, however it relies on just two buttons: RT, and B. RT is the attack button, and B is the "jump backwards" (as the game describes it) button. Combat can be fairly simple, and at even the lowest level, with a few save points and patience, even the toughest of foes can be taken down. Combat is done in real time, simply run up to the enemy, tap RT loads to attack it, and press B when it goes in for the attack. Combat can get especially intense when the enemies pile in, although it can also get pretty frustrating. A lot of enemies just seem to kill you in one hit, and it can be quite unfair since you have no real indication on how tough the enemy is. However, as a whole, I enjoyed the combat in the game and didn't have many problems with it.

After that massive paragraph, it's time to explain why Two Worlds is so flawed. Whilst I've already explained the poor menu and map design, what else bugs me? Almost everything. The gameplay works well, as does the combat, but it took me a helluva long time to figure that stuff out. At first I didn't even know you needed to learn skills from trainers (for a rip-off price), I didn't even know you could combine items together to improve them, and it took me a very long time to even figure out the spell system (fortunately, you start with a Heal spell, and if you keep piling on the Heal spells, much like with weapons, it increases it's value, and that one Heal spell was all I needed). The game just doesn't present itself very well, and most of the time it can be very confusing. The main story quests also needed work. It does give you some sense of free-roam, you're tasking with collecting a few elements to make this staff device. You're told what elements you need, and you're off. To actually get the elements, you need to travel to different towns, and do these completely random quests to get it. Fortunately my friend also got the official guide which I eventually borrowed. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to beat Two Worlds. The locations of quests are just so random... The game just doesn't ease the player in well enough. Morrowind does start off a little confusing, but as I played Morrowind more and more, I accustomed to it. However with Two Worlds, I was just complete confused the whole way through. The game also features loads of bugs and glitches, and just some down-right stupid things. For example, I was tasked with delivering an item to the Merchants guild in the main city. I head over, and guess what? The door to the Merchants guild is locked. What the hell do I do? I pick the lock and the guards demand 30K, or I can leave the city and never return (or, if I kill the guards, the whole town goes against me). This is the only entrance, and I can't get inside. The guide claims you must have enough reputation with the Merchants Guild to get inside. However, this quest is actually the first quest you do with the Merchants Guild, so how do I get more reputation? I have to beat this quest to get more quests, so I'm just stuck. I got in eventually though, I stood at the door and it randomly opened a little (I was looking at the guide when I heard the door open) so I quickly ran inside and completed the quest. Many other quests feature stupid little things like this, it can often get frustrating (one quest required me to enter a cave, however I needed a password, an extra quest came up called "no password" but I couldn't do anything with it, and the quest giver said nothing). Some quests are designed well, but a lot of them are designed poorly. The controls for the horse were absolutely terrible as well. You have to push up, and that automatically speeds up the horse. Holding up makes the horse turn, it took me a while to figure out I'm meant to leave it. However, the horse instantly stops and almost any hill, and can't swim (I much prefer it in Oblivion, if you keep persistent, you can get up most surfaces, and you can swim). I know it's more realistic, but I just found it annoying how I couldn't go down a little gap. Also, the horse seemed to randomly slow down at times for no reason. Rubbish controls, I much prefer to run since the horse wasn't that much faster. Unfortunately there is one massive flaw in the game, and I'll explain it here, despite the fact it ties in with the graphics. The frame rate on this game is awful. Whilst playing through the game it lagged so much it was unbelievable. Enemies took ages to load (whenever I loaded the game if I was near enemies, or just general NPCs, they took a while to load so I couldn't actually fight them), and even during combat, it got quite frustrating when the game wouldn't run properly. It really takes away from the game, no game should lag like Two Worlds did, and it was unacceptable.

The graphics in Two Worlds aren't that bad. They're not as good as most other titles, but they're still pretty good. I wasn't unimpressed with them to say the least. The characters don't look too bad, and the water effect was pretty good. However, the audio is where it all falls down. Trust me when I say the voice acting and the dialogue are absolutely terrible. The dialogue itself is pretty dire, with over use of words such as "nay", "tis", "aye" and "pray" you will soon get sick of it. The hero also makes such "witty" remarks, for example, when it starts raining he will remark "what wonderful weather", and when it stops raining, "it's raining again". The hero comes out with some utter rubbish, especially when you're fighting or looting corpses, it's embarrassing. The voice acting itself doesn't help either. It sounds like some one void of any emotion is just reading the words out, being the first time they've ever seen them, whilst some voice actors completely overdid it. I skipped most conversations by reading the subtitles so I didn't have to listen to the terrible voice acting. It's worse than Japanese RPGs, and thats saying something.

If you see Two Worlds cheap, and you love RPGs, it's definitely worth giving a try. Yes, the audio is terrible and it's incredibly hard to navigate the menu system, but when you get used to it, there is plenty of content for you to enjoy. The game, despite the fairly short main quest, is absolutely packed with quests, enemies, and dungeons for you to raid. There are masses of content for those dedicated, and once you get accustomed to the game, it can be quite enjoyable. There are much better RPGs out there, but if you're looking to complete your collection, Two Worlds ain't a bad addition.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/24/08

Game Release: Two Worlds (Limited Edition) (EU, 09/07/07)