Two Worlds
In Two Worlds you’ll enter a world where a dark crusade is brewing and darker plans are being made, out of sight. Thousands of years ago, hordes of orcs invaded the more civilized lands. Aziraal, the Orcish god of war, was killed in battle, forcing the orcs to withdraw to the southern wastelands. When a dwarven mining expedition uncovers an ancient tomb, the Orcs believe it to be their fallen god. A holy war ignites, but the real danger lies elsewhere. A powerful force churns silently – weaving a secret plot of fear and destruction. In the end, one of the Two Worlds will remain. Use traps and snares to make gameplay more flexible & strategic Combat system combines intuitive steering, tactical challenges and movie-like visual experiences
User Ratings and Reviews
3 Stars Maybe Not the Best Game, But For All Its Faults, It Has Potential
Okay, here we go…
When I play a game, I’m firmly of the mind to let the game stand or fall based on its own merits. Like it or hate it (well, I can’t say I actually HATE anything; that’s an awfully strong word and it applies only, for me anyway, if you dislike someone or something so much that you lie awake at night thinking up ways to ruin it) on its own strengths or lack thereof. That being said, Two Worlds presents players with an interesting dichotomy. It IS its own game and wants to be seen as such.
However…
The developers, Reality Pump, made every effort to design this game in almost exactly the same format as Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. They even went so far as to post Hardcore Gamer’s remark of “it’s Oblivion on steroids” on the back cover in the hopes that, if not actually riding its coattails, their work could at least tag along on the previous game’s success.
I can’t really blame them for this, but while that kind of idea looks good on paper and comparisons between games are inevitable (especially between ones that are so similar), I believe they did themselves a disservice. Truly, measuring apples to apples, this game falls short of the mark.
Like the saying goes, be careful what you wish for…
Gameplay-4 Stars
Two Worlds presents you with the largest sandbox area to roam around in of any game that’s not an MMORPG. Yes, the map is larger than Oblivion’s 16 square miles, and it does display several different cultural styles, from a cross between Medieval European and Roman in the north to Middle-Eastern in the east and historical Japanese in the south, but whereas Oblivion’s architectural styles were all based around a similar design, they all had a cohesiveness that bound them together. You felt there was a reason for their sameness. With Two Worlds, it was like they just threw those styles in there ‘just because’, with no rhyme or reason. Also, with a playground of that size, it would be nice to have someone to play with. Oblivion gave me enough to do on its map that my first character logged in about 650 hours of playtime before I started a new one and I now have about 1000 hours logged in between three different heroes. Completing almost all of the quests up to the finish of the game took me just under 30 hours on Two Worlds, and with Two Worlds, when you’re done the game, you’re done. Not so with Oblivion. THAT game allows you to continue on, developing your character after the main quest line has been finished (there really is no true ending to Oblivion). Between the different settlements, there are a lot more animals to run across in Two Worlds, but once you kill them, they’re gone, aside from the occasional ghost that comes back to haunt the remains. That means that, if you complete all the quests except for the main one, you’re eventually left with nothing to do but run around and look at the scenery, unless you suddenly get the urge to kill all the townspeople. And after they’re gone (shrug)… Given enough game time with Oblivion, the creatures and opponents you encounter in your travels respawn, ensuring that you can always stay occupied. The areas are also nowhere near as interactive. In Oblivion, any person or creature you kill could be looted for gear. In, Two Worlds, you can do this as well, but there only a few chests that you can open up (and you HAVE to pick a lock on all of them). There are very few loose objects you find in this game, other than the odd torch in a cave. In Oblivion, anything you search through, from chests to crates to bookshelves, had something that could be obtained and either sold off, used or studied. Any boxes or barrels in Two Worlds is pretty much ‘gakk’, used to fill up space, kind of like pie thickener.
Without cheat codes (I found mine on gamefaqs.com and they’re identical between the console and PC versions), this game is almost impossibly difficult to start out on. I managed to make my way out of the temple you begin the game in, but I ran into a group of 3 groms (Two Worlds’ equivalent of goblins, I guess) along the road to the nearest town and they pretty much had me for Sunday dinner. So did the wolves nearby. To make matters more exasperating, there are revival points, known as Maliel shrines, where you recuperate. The wolves followed me to the shrine and attacked me there and killed me three more times before I could finish them off. That was the point when I turned to my wife, went “rrrraaaAAAAAAaaarrrr!!!” (and scared the poor girl half to death; sorry, hon!), and said “That’s it! Time for cheat codes!”, got them online and started upping my skills and abilities. It went much smoother after that. There are no cheat codes available for the console version of Oblivion, but the Gameplay Menu in Options contains a Difficulty slider that makes combat much easier, should you choose it to be so.
Two Worlds gameplay mechanics are skill-based, allowing you to spend the parameter points and skill points you acquire on your journey in the manner of your choosing, although there is a levelling function that affects certain aspects of gameplay (if you go to a town and buy equipment, there is a minimum level you have to be at to utilize it, and your level affects how how the payout is; if you buy a sword at 1st level, you might pay 150 gold for it and buying that same sword when you were 20th level might cost you 11000 gold, and this also affects the payout upon completion of certain quests). The parameter points are allocated among your 4 statistics (Vitality, Dexterity, Strength and Willpower). Increasing these statistics -and there is no ceiling on how how you can raise them up, unlike Oblivion’s cap of 100- increases your derived attributes, things like Attack and Defense ratings, Health and Mana (Magic Power) ratings, and so on. there are a total of 27 different Skills to put points into categorized as both Active or Passive skills. Active skills must be put into the hotkey circle and activated in game. Passive skills are always in effect. Each one has a maximum level of 15. Some of the skills aren’t really anything more than a modifier to your given actions. For example, the Berserk skill increases your chance of causing damage when your health is reduced to a certain amount. I didn’t end up using magic that much, other than what was inherent in my character’s gear, but the spells I did cast had some cool effects.
The interface, especially on the map screen takes some getting used to. The hand shaped cursor is hard to move between closely placed objective markers and the map can only be moved by the d-pad. One nice function it has that Oblivion’s map screen doesn’t is the zoom function.
The only thing you can apply magic upgrades to are the weapons. Armor comes with bonuses that are ready-made. Two Worlds allows you to combine weapons and armor that are the same to increase either their damage (weapons) or their protection (armor). That is NOT a facet of Oblivion’s capabilities, in that just about any weapon or piece of armor is magically upgradeable if it hasn’t been already.
The one major issue I have with the gameplay is with riding the mounts. First off, the back cover makes the claim that there are six different types to choose from. I have only been able to find three; a normal horse, a four-legged lizard creature that the orcs ride and a horse’s skeleton you find at the necromancer’s towers. Also, you have to be VERY careful where you take your ride, because it has no jumping capabilities and it balks at the least little incline. One of the first quests I finished awarded me with a horse. I took off on it at full speed and headed on south down the trail and almost IMMEDIATELY wedged the horse between two roads. And there it stayed. Absolutely no amount of effort could dislodge that horse, and all along the course of my adventure, every time I ran up or down that trail, there it was. I waved hello to it each time and shook my head as I ran past. And that’s all I did afterwards; ran. In Oblivion, I could ride my horse anywhere, even into the water (if I felt like drowning it and having to buy a new one at a local stable).
Now, you might think that with eveything I’ve just spouted off on, there were no redeeming features. Wrong. For all of its faults, the game was much more stable than Oblivion was for me. I never had any problems with Two Worlds freezing up on me like I had with Oblivion, and with Oblivion, there were quests I wasn’t allowed to finish because of glitches. The quests I couldn’t complete were different for each character I played, but it was frustrating not to be able to finish everything in Oblivion without being cut off in some way. Not so with Two Worlds. If you pick up a job from somewhere, as long as you can figure out how to work it up, you can do so with no hassle.
Story-3 Stars
The story for Two Worlds is interesting. Apparently, 300 years ago, the god of the orcs, Aziraal, fell in battle and was entombed in a hidden place. Now, three centuries later the dwarves, in their underground mining escapades, have uncovered his final resting place, and whipped the orcs up into a religious fervor. They want their god’s body and, because nobody’s willng to give it to them, are willing to go to war for it. You play a bounty hunter who’s just passing through the area with his sister. Your sister is ill and you stop for the night at this abandoned farmhouse, only to wake up in the morning to discover she’s been kidnapped by a group of people wanting to resurrect Aziraal for their own purposes. Lo and behold, you and your sister are wound up in a prophecy involving the dead god, and she’s been taken to force you to comply with the bad boy’s demands. Following up on some leads, you enter a musty old temple…
It takes a good story to keep me hooked on a game. This one had promise, but I never felt it was implemented very well. I found out through a third party site why the orcs were all stirred up, but it was never explained during the course of your adventure. All I knew was that the orcs were mad at everyone and ready to kill them all to get Aziraal back. The only interaction I had with them was to kill them, aside from this one conversation with an orc called White Head who wanted an honorable confrontation with an army captain who’d been busy hunting him down. I set up the meet for them and White Head’s reaction was basically ‘Thanks, you’re honorable too. Now stay out of my way!’. Other than that, every time I encountered a group of orcs, it was “Have at thee!!” and away we went. Same with the dwarves. No explanation as to what they were doing to remedy the situation they caused. Just, if they saw you, “Ahh… Tall person. Kill him!” The whole crux of the game’s theme panned down to doing what it took to recover your sister and not wanting to be wound up in any damned old prophecy anyway. Everything else felt incidental. Maybe this story was simply meant as a jump start to the sequel that’s coming out (Two Worlds: The Temptation), but I felt it could have been smoother in its flow.
Sound-4 Stars
The sound in Two Worlds is alright. The music adapts to the situation and the area you find yourself in, becoming more frenetic when you come upon a fierce opponent and more gloomy and foreboding in the underground areas. It switches to an Asian flavor when you travel to the city of Ashos in the bamboo jungle and has a Middle-Eastern flair to it out in the desert (easily my favorite soundtracks of the game). In the haunted, undead areas, the music became quite gothic.
The voice acting could have used a lot of polish. I understand that this game is fantasy-based, but the archaic dialogue felt out of place. especially when you hear “I prithee, methinks.” in an American accent. Granted, the actors tried, but didn’t quite pull off what they set out to do. Maybe some big-name actors might have helped with this issue. Who knows?
Graphics-3 Stars
The graphics, for the most part, were a little rough. The framerate slowed downed noticeably when there was a lot of clutter on the screen. The worst part was when I was in the desert. The sunlight reflecting off the sand was so prevalent and bright that it made my eyes water and often made me miss something coming up to attack me. The sunlight would quite literally white out the screen. Other than that, the draw distance was fairly good, in that you could see objects all the way to the horizon. Still, there are no bloom effects or anti-aliasing to smooth out rough edges. You can tell the visuals for what they are: graphical representations.
The game makes use of the Aegia physics engine, which is a decent one, but it only seemed to be implemented on the smaller creatures. Those, like bandits or groms, would fall down dead in believable ways. If I killed an ogre or a cyclops or a demon (huge suckers), they always did the same clutching of their chests, staggering around and then falling on their backs. A lot of times, they would clip into a rock or a wall far enough to where I couldn’t loot the corpse.
Didn’t have time to finish. More to follow.
Replay-3 Stars
Overall-3 Stars
3 Stars Great game with technical flaws
If anyone involved in the game industry ever reads this:
DELAY THE GAME
If by releasing the game early, you think it will still be a success with these kind of flaws, you are wrong. This is blatantly clear in the population of the servers of this game. There are broken skills, and even one that isnt used (unhorse). There are no mounted enemies in single player. I have seen a maximum of one horse per multiplayer map, though i have certainly not played them all. It feels like a very long demo. Oddly, i did not like the demo..
DO NOT MIS-ADVERTISE YOUR GAME
For a reviewer to call it an (X) killer, its one thing. To repeat that on your own game box is a terrible marketing choice. Instead of focusing simply on two worlds as a game, gamers will automically be seeing it as a comparison. They claimed many things to be in the game, that simply were not. Even on the box of the game, it claims one of the mount types to be a “lizard creature.” The closest is a skeleton-like horse. The box claims no load times between indoors and outdoors. How this is done is through a series of smaller loads during gameplay. I will note it has yet to load during combat (that i have noticed).
I just felt i needed to take two stars off for these issues. You cant put out a finished product that is in this stage of development!
What happened to this game is that they marketed their ideal two worlds game as the final product. They either were not realistic about their goals, or they did not have enough time to realize them. Judging by the detail and promise of the “beta,” my guess is the latter, which is inexcusable.
I will not do a pro/con analysis, as “The Lazer Viking” did this very well. I am just a bit harsher about the technical issues!
With all that being said, i absolutely love this game! I would call it an open-world dungeon crawler. I just cant put it down, there is a definite “grinding” aspect to it, especially multiplayer. The levels are spaced relatively well, but it does take a while to get 50+. There is no relevant level cap. This aspect of gameplay does remind me of World at Warcraft, which i saw another reviewer allude to, but i would never compare the two games. I definitely would not say if you like one, you will like the other.
In my mind, the dungeon crawler aspect includes many different items such as weapons, armor, rings, gems, minerals, plants, and spell cards. The armor and rings can be stacked for more powerful items, and the gems minerals, and plants can be used in alchemy for enchantment of weapons/armor, as well as permanent stat building. The spell cards are stackable as too, with added booster cards to modify the spells (such as “mana saver”). The alchemy system is very deep, and that will only appeal to some. With some recipes you can “level up” your stats through alchemy, permanently and temporarily. With others, you create enchantments and some items (bombs and traps). I would suggest looking online for more info on the system.
Yes, the speech is terrible, but i found it extremely entertaining. It had me laughing constantly. The way some things are said had to be intentionally subtle humor. Well, maybe not, but i certainly found it funny!
I did find the combat engaging. The gameplay leads you to mash the right trigger, but if you tap the right trigger two/three times in a row, then do it again starting ~2 swings in, you will do more damage over time. If you tap it four times, you will take longer to recover from the last swing. There is skill involved, but its vague. There is no block, but with a back-jump, it creates a much more aggressive combat. I dont care about having a block, i actually enjoyed the faster pace. I would have definitely liked to see an active parry though..
There really is an excellent core game here, the problem is the delivery. For me, this is not as big of a problem as it sounds. For others, it will make or break the game. My biggest issue is with the fact that 90% of the problems could have been fixed with more time.
Basically, if you like tinkering with armor, and learning an expansive alchemy system (get your skill to 10 before you even mess with it), you just might like this game. You can even open a command prompt (RB+LB+A) where you can spawn ALL items in the game (disables achievements for that save). You can adjust grass length, shadow detail, water reflections, etc. You can also create entire towns, and NPCs. You can not interact with creates buildings or NPCs though. This feature utilize some basic code, and is NOT an official “creation mode.” I would not touch this feature without looking it up online, and feel confident about putting in code into a game. For a someone like me, this is a game in and of itself. This mode does not work on multiplayer, for obvious reasons!
ill just finish with how i ended my Oblivion review, with a few edits where applicable;
“I think when it comes down to it, people just like different games. The best way to put it is with an analogy. If you like cars that look pretty, with amazing paint jobs, great lines, big rims, but dont do anything when you step on the gas, you probably will not like this game. If you would like a “sleeper” that no one would look twice at.. until you hit the throttle, you will probably like this game.”
Obviously, its an ANALOGY, so i wouldnt use the quote to determine whether you will buy this game.
As with –ALL– games, rent before you buy!!!!
3 Stars Ehh… It’s “ok”
I picked this up in the bargain bin of a store for under $14. Never heard of it, looked semi-interesting. I figured I’d give it a shot.
Well, it’s “ok”. The bar is raised pretty high for these third person type games (by gears of war, star wars the force unleashed, etc.) and this game, although it looks nice enough, unfortunately just does not look or play as nice as the other games I have played.
Also, there is an awful lot of dialog which tends to get boring very quickly. The acting is sub-par, even for a video game. The animation in the movies is also pretty bad (I think the game action actually looks BETTER than the movies.)
I also find it cumbersome in that you need to walk up to characters, talk to them, and “figure out” what to do next.
All in all, I’ll probably spend some more time with this game – but most likely will not finish it.
If you are a fan of the genre, and if you can pick this up on the cheap (say, in a bargain bin) then maybe it’s for you. I wouldn’t spend the full price on this.
3 Stars Eh..
This game was not at all what I had hoped for..
The learning curve was ridiculous..
The graphics are high PS2 range at best..
The gameplay/controls would NOT be easy to get used to at all if you haven’t played a game like this before..
And the storyline is mediocre at best..
Get this game only if you have A LOT of time to kill.. Because it’s going to take a while just to get used to it, then to get into it, and even longer to painfully drudge through the whole thing..
2 Stars I hate LAG!!
Overall, its an ok RPG set in the clasic first person style, but lacking in custom charactors, the storyline is rather weak, and to be honest, both endings are rather unfulfilling. No matter the difficulty that you set it at, (I completed all three) there is really very little in the way of a challenge. A simple dodge will allow you, as even the weakest of characters, to take on and destroy anything in the game. Also, there is a complete lack of polish on this game. The graphics are “ok”. I would not really say there are any scenes within that are breathtaking. Also, the game is not really set up to allow for smooth gameplay. Its bad when I can swing a sword and have time to drink a soda before it hits. For anyone who is looking for a good RPG to see an amazing story and be blown away by the graphics and settings, I would highly reccomend that you look elsewhere. This is certainly not in the same league as “Oblivion” or “Morrowind”. All in all, I can honestly say that I was not impressed at all. Oh, and completion time for all sidequests and primary storyline is a whopping 19 hours. I believe I spent 65 on “Morrowind”. So the game is rather short. There really arent any truely redeaming things that this game has to offer.
Buy/More Info
