Two Worlds Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on October 2nd, 2007

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These issues are relatively minor when considering the massive playground you have at your disposal. It quite bluntly isn't as good as Oblivion's (you never thought it would be did you?) but it does provide an awful lot to sink your exploring-teeth into. Indeed, it'll certainly be a lot of fun if you like this sort of thing; its ambition and open-ended nature should satisfy genre fans at the very least. Two Worlds does offer mini-games by way of multiplayer (horse racing, death matches, etc) however disappointingly nothing by way of co-op quests. Still, it's better to have something than nothing and extra marks go to Reality Pump for making the effort.

A well-crafted and ultimately huge slice of video gaming.

Two Worlds is pretty much Fable mixed with Oblivion.except with horrible gameplay mechanics. The programming and graphical qualities of the game are worse than the earliest PS2 games. In fact, the frame rate is so choppy, I was worried that this game was damaging the internal workings of my 360. Every few steps, the game would skip, then freeze a little, then a loud loading noise would be expelled from my 360 hardware, then the game would pick up again. The inconsistent frame rate not only damages gameplay, but it feels like this disc is trying to make the 3 Red Lights of Death appear. I am not joking.

Now, onto the nastier stuff. Two Worlds is atrocious to look at, and even worse to hear. The graphics themselves are actually very nice... when they aren't moving. The framerate is stable, but the game engine chugs, meaning that it hitches up every few seconds. Eww. The animation is even worse, and sometimes just plain lazy. I'm not sure if there aren't enough frames of animation, or if the game is locking up, but most enemies fight as if they were part of a slideshow. The main character's movements are decent enough, but still, problems arise. There are no animation transitions, which means everything is very choppy- if you're putting away your sword, and you want to move at the same time, you'll move and your sword will magically be sheathed- and sometimes not even stacked. For example, enemies can stun you, which is signified by the character standing in one place, rolling his head back and forth in a daze. The thing is, you can still move, meaning you can magically scoot around the playing field without moving your legs, rolling your head around like a moronic zombie. And here's the kicker- only some things have ragdoll. What on earth? Smacking a bandit around will result in a satisfying physics-based death, but some enemies, like Ogres and Wyverns, die the same way no matter what- falling over sideways to the left in a somewhat anticlimactic death throe. But honestly, as bad as all this sounds, nothing can prepare the player for the sound.

Oh, God, the sound. It's bad enough when every actor is trying to speak in broken, vaguely Shakespearean English, but it's even worse when they try to put on an accent far beyond their reach. Everything is overenthusiastic and forced, and every conversation is about ten sentences too long. When it takes ten minutes to receive a fetch quest, things have gone too far. I'm not sure if (Mayhap) was ever a word, but if it was, the person who first penned it should be condemned forever, and the writer cruel enough to work it into each sentence of Two Worlds should suffer the same fate. I'm sure after a few brewskis, this stuff makes sense, but anyone playing Two Worlds sober will just want to bust their eardrums with a rusty spoon. The one saving grace in this aural disaster is the main character. Oh, he's terribly acted, but in a good way. His one liners are cheesy and frequent, but compared to the garbage coming out of the NPC's mouths, they're practically Tolstoy. Still, his arrogant cry of (Ha HA!) sounds eerily like Stephen Colbert's Phil from Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law. It's also a bit weird when he quips (It's starting to RAIN!) when in fact it has been raining for about half an hour.

On paper it seems quite promising. The story is the usual RPG-lite affair. You play a mercenary bounty hunter with a mean streak, whose frighteningly-sexy-for-a-load-of-pixels sister, Kira, has been kidnapped by a shadowy group of individuals bent on world domination. The ransom? The use of an eldritch artefact that - thanks to some seriously unlucky family heritage - can only be activated by you. Of course, along the way you can abandon your white-knuckle race against Time and Destiny to do some monster-bashing, heirloom-recovering, fetch-and-carry quests for various bone idle NPCs in true RPG style, and return to the main quest to save the world of Antaloor whenever you're ready. The quest-system itself is no different from any other game in this genre; it's a simple question of speaking to a character and going where they tell you to, killing or stealing whatever is there and returning for your reward. The size of the game world is impressive though, with huge rolling hills, glittering lakes and dark forests all wrapped around cities, towns, abandoned towers and derelict mines just waiting for the well-armed explorer that you are.

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