Two Worlds

Two Worlds is a third person open world RPG in a similar game-play style to recent games in the Elder Scrolls series.

There's not much customisation in terms of appearance of your human character. The character class can't be explicitly defined which is a good thing because this means you can create a hybrid character and freely assign the skill points as you wish. So you can initially start building a mage character by investing in the magic areas, and then assign attributes to the rogue style skills like lock-picking.

The story begins with the abduction of your sister. You are told she is being held ransom until you put together the pieces of a relic with the aim of resurrecting the orc-god Aziraal. Although you are given a main quest, you are free to explore the game world doing the game's many side-quests.

The first thing you'll notice is the game's terrible dialogue and voice acting which is probably the worst I've ever heard. The game's olde-English dialogue will soon get tiring with your character starting many sentences with “pray tell me”, and him incorrectly calling all enemies “bandits”.

The combat is mainly down to alternating between a few attacks then timing your dodge move to avoid taking damage. Enemies do not respawn once killed which isn't a problem because the world is densely populated with life, so there is plenty to kill. The enemies do not scale in level with you, so you will encounter very weak enemies in some regions, and insanely strong ones in others. To start with, the wolves and groms (goblins) seem very tough and you really need to learn to dodge in order to survive.

It is easy to see why the beginning of the game turned a lot of people away, but when you reach level 10 or so; the game will appear easy. You can't get complacent though, because soon you will no doubt meet a tough monster who will wipe you out in one hit. It seems the difficulty level is all over the place but it's probably a better system than the Elder Scrolls system. In those games, the challenge soon disappears and seems to get easier as you progress; at least this game keeps you on your toes and has plenty of challenging moments throughout. If you do die, you will respawn at the nearest shrine with no penalty. There are plenty of these shrines all over the map and interestingly; you may respawn at a shrine that you haven't even found yet. Your health and mana slowly regenerate when your weapon is sheathed and you can also restore them using magic, potions, or at the numerous shrines.

There are a huge amount of side-quests in the game, and the map is impressively large. Like the shrines, there are plenty of teleports scattered around the map, meaning you can travel quickly between previously explored areas. I spent most of the time in the northern half of the map which contains a vast amount of groms (goblins), human bandits, wolves and bears. Once you travel around, you realise a huge difference in locations and enemies. The very southern region is over-run with orcs, plant-like monsters make their home in the south-west, scorpions and Anubis-like jackals roam the desert to the south-east. As you play, day turns to night and the weather changes dynamically.

The game does pause for a couple of seconds as you travel the map in order to load, and there are some occasional pop-up and frame-rate stutters, but nothing too problematic. The map is very poor though and is very frustrating to manoeuvre and keep track of your side-quests. Annoyingly, the side-quests that you can finish were usually marked with a flashing green light but sometimes it showed as blue. Some of the descriptions were a little vague so it does help to find a walk-though to help point you in the right direction.

The equipment system is pretty cool. You can carry more items with higher strength up to a certain point, then are limited in terms of space on your scrollable panel. Each item is shown graphically at various sizes; so a sword is long and thin, a flower is small, and a chest plate armour is quite long and fairly wide. If you have duplicate equipment items, you can combine them to make a stronger version, so combining two swords that have 50 damage may turn into a sword that has 60 damage. At the start of the game you use this feature a lot, but its much harder to find combinable items later on.

On your travels, you will find all sorts of vegetation growing in the wild and these can be collected and used to make potions. When you make a potion, the ingredients and result is saved for you to quickly create it again, and this can be given a name of your choice. You can also apply items to your equipment to add extra elemental damage to them.

The goods that merchants carry, and the items that are found in chests or on enemies are randomly chosen; so it's always worthwhile taking a peek at what is available. It's definitely worth taking advantage of the lock-picking skill early on in the game.

The graphics in the game are fine contrary to the numerous critic's and player reviews trashing the game for this reason. The graphics kind of reminds me of Dragon Age 1, since it looked pretty dull and bland. Sure, it's not amazing, but cannot be called 'bad'. The animations on the other hand seem a bit lacking and so character's movement can be a bit jerky.

Horses are hard to control when you aren't on the road and they often refuse to traverse gentle slopes that your character has no problem with. People also say it is full of bugs, but it only crashed 3 times during my play-though, and I didn't notice any other strange things happen apart from some inconsistencies with the quest colours.

People somehow claim it's the worst game on the 360, but it is far from it; it may not be perfect, but it's a solid RPG. If you have played Elder Scrolls Oblivion/Skyrim, then it will probably ruin your enjoyment of the game, but if you start with this game first; it definitely will be entertaining.