Two Worlds Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on September 28th, 2007

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Long ago, in the land of Been There
Missing siblings, Orcs, imprisoned deities, magical artifacts cut into pieces and scattered across the land -- Two Worlds is like a fantasy Mad Lib. You're a mercenary (male only&sorry, ladies) seeking his kidnapped sister and acting as the unwilling pawn in a saw-that-coming plot to resurrect the evil Orc god Aziraal. As in other open-world games, you're free to follow or ignore this banal storyline, with its absurdly pompous Olde Englishe script and atrocious voice acting.

Such a harsh utterance was bestowed upon me by my rap-influenced, generically named Xbox Live buddy, SPAZ. A powerful statement, indeed, but in this day and age with multimillion dollar development costs, can a game truly be that bad?

Well, yes and no. You see, Two Worlds isn't a bad game, per se; it's just a generic one. The few original ideas that it pioneers are broken beyond all recognition. Throughout this admittedly huge adventure with a world that rivals the size of that other free-roaming 360 RPG you will fight wolves, boars, bears, bandits, orcs, dragons, and goblins groms. You'll encounter caves, villlages, underground dungeons, huge castle towns, and forests. All of the locations, while meticulosly detailed, are the same you've been seeing in just about every single RPG for years.

It will become obvious in a manner all sorts of tedious and frustrating that this is a PC game through and through. Map navigation and menu management aren't just cumbersome: they are a chore. Going from left to right on the inventory screen is a crapshoot as the cursor is not free to roam around but limited to the item panels, sometimes not jumping over to the other section, making inventory management, a significant portion of the game, a huge hassle. Similarly, moving around on the map is also a pain because scrolling has been relegated to the directional pad, which makes the entire process sslloowww.

The audio is the main culprit of Two Worlds. A jarring use of Old English grates in just under a few minutes, yet it is the lifeless delivery of the dialogue which really makes you want to pack your bags and leave the game world early. Combat audio is pretty slack, with most games beyond the simple slash and stab animations and effects of years gone by. There is a severe lack of effects and music, and the quality of what is in the game is negligible and forgettable, at best.

Overall, there is simply nothing that makes Two Worlds a wholly worthy purchase. It has some nice ideas, but Two Worlds feels like a title that needed a lot more work before its release. Given some time, and a good patch which would help some of the game's technical issues, and Two Worlds may be good enough to consider. As it stands, Two Worlds stands alone.

But this isn't enough for Two Worlds to beat its main competitor. The online play is the feather in the Reality Pump hat. Or at least it would be if it worked. The game is full of lag. You could have the fastest connection in the world, but with the game being hosted on one server in Europe for the whole world, there was always going to be problems. It is unfortunately so laggy it is impossible to play. Fighting cannot be achieved succesfully and coming up against another opponent is really a game of luck more than anything. There is a promise of a patch to fix the online problems, there is also a lot of glitching that happens, but until this promised fix I can't honestly see anyone being able to play properly online.

Two Worlds does have some very good aspects to it. The single player game is decent once you get into it and you start building up your character. If they do manage to resolve the online issues then I think there is far more going for Two Worlds than its current state suggests. At the moment though, the game is simply far too flawed to be recommended.

By now, you've probably read numerous review scores for Two Worlds that must make for tough viewing back in Poland. This vast, sweeping high fantasy RPG has taken a hammering in the press and, to be honest, quite justifiably. It's a game that got me very angry indeed principally because, underneath the dreadful presentation and largely massively unfriendly interface, there are many decent ideas and a huge amount of gameplay. OK, so the ideas and gameplay are nothing new (>coughcough<), but at least they are there.

I wanted to play! I wanted to explore! I wanted to enjoy myself! But the game wouldn't let me. There was a constant, Jim Bowen-like presence standing at my shoulder saying "Here's what you could have played!" then taking it away from me. Very frustrating.

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