Two Worlds Review @ GameSpy
Short of either an intense desire to see the RPG genre sullied or
irrepressible masochistic tendencies, you've got no reason to play Two Worlds. Except for an interesting pair of item creation and character leveling systems, every element of Two Worlds lurks somewhere between "atrocity" and "horror." It's rare we get to simply lay into a title, but Two Worlds for the 360 is undeserving of any mercy.
Verily Prithee Sirrah Nonce Hizzah!
Begin with a graphics engine that looks like it was kept carefully in
reserve since the Playstation 2 launch, with identical flora and
choppily animated creatures filling its choppily-moving landscapes.
Your character's model will reflect what you have equipped, but for the
most part it will simply appear that you're equipped with "badly
textured sword-shaped weapon 1," or "robe whose fabric your legs keep
passing through X." Identical swarms of enemies will attack you, with
wolves who are undistinguishable from boars (or any other gray
quadruped) as an early warning of the graphical horrors to come.
"Swarms" come up often, as there appears to be no one at developer
Reality Pump studios who can balance difficulty. Hordes of enemies
wander the world, and while you'll eventually reach a point where
almost any enemy is laughably easy, you'll spend most of the game
desperately trying to kill even one foe before being killed yourself.
Although death has no penalty, dropping you to the nearest resurrection
shrine, combat balance shouldn't come in the form of delivering a few
hits, resurrecting, delivering a few more hits, resurrecting, and
repeating ad nauseum.
Built around a wide-open and original world, Two Worlds
casts you as a fantasy hero who speaks with more "prithees," "verilys,"
and other randomly inserted Ye Olde Englishe words than is necessary or
correct. So does everyone else, though. Everyone also shares the habit
of babbling like a drug addict a week into an involuntary detox,
stringing together bits of dialogue that technically make sense but
just aren't worth listening to. The tale of ancient evil and a family
curse (that's secretly a power!) is poorly written and poorly delivered
to the point where you almost feel embarrassed for the virtual
thespians forced to enact the lines.
Combat uses the right trigger for melee and the left trigger for your
chosen special ability. In theory, different taps of the right trigger
cause different attacks, but in reality you'll just be slamming the
trigger down as often as you can. You'll have to pause to cast your
healing spell with the left trigger, but you may want to reconsider
doing that -- that's a few seconds during which you could get another
hit in before your inevitable death at the claws and teeth of
unavoidable, incredibly dangerous random encounters. You're probably
better off just resurrection-loop attacking them than wasting mana you
could use in a boss fight -- and don't worry, it'll be much easier than
this pack of random monsters you bumped into. Good luck trying to
engage at range or tactically, by the way, since the combat engine
simply selects your targeted foe for you.
The character customization system offers some hope for Two Worlds,
with meaningful choices of stat, skill, and power upgrades each time
you level up. Identical low-level items can be easily combined (despite
an unintuitive, to be polite, inventory interface) to produce
reasonably powerful items for your level -- or they can be sold. And
magic spells can be changed by putting different modifier "cards" on
them, creating a card layout representing your own versions of your
basic spell selections. It's a shame that these systems are stuck in Two Worlds.
Is There Any Hope At All
Beyond the horror show of Two Worlds' graphics, looking past the amateur-hour-at-the-Apollo balancing, and even ignoring the bitingly bad dialogue, Two Worlds
manages to raise the bar for technical issues as well. In spurts from
every few minutes to every few seconds, the game will come to a
complete standstill as it tries to load its
unimpressive-seven-years-ago graphics. Magical effects (like healing)
will also tend to create fatal slowdown, and the framerate isn't all
that hot anyways. AAA bugs that require restarting your 360 also
abound, the perfect frosting to a cake made of garbage and offal.
It's rare that a game releases that is so shockingly incompetent.
Online options don't make it any better; they're simply a chance to
play a terrible game with other people, in a few innovative modes like
"Team Deathmatch." When something this just plain malign comes out,
it's cause for a sort of celebration, because every other game will
seem better by comparison. If you absolutely insist on playing Two Worlds, at least you can rest easy in the knowledge that every other 360 game you play afterward -- and we're including Sneak King on that list -- will be a better, more polished experience.
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