Better than Oblivion...rrriiiggghhhttt.
It's funny how people say that graphics don't matter. Graphics don't make the game. Sorry, but graphics really DO make the game when it's a long game that is going to stretch past the 20+ marker. When you play a long game, as great as the plot and everything is, if the game is an eyesore, then the enjoyment will be marred. And as far as Two World's graphics are concerned, the game is drop dead gorgeous...at least the environments are concerned. The draw distance, field of depth, villages, castles, and dungeons are incredibly rendered. The HDR makes everything look fantastic, especially when it comes to the sunsets, sunrises, glowing flowers, and so on. The armor is greatly rendered and the water looks amazing. The trees and the animals are beautiful. Two Worlds succeeds at making a believable looking world. Even the horses have incredible looking fur on them. Having said all of that, the biggest problem with the graphics are the character models, close-up textures of buildings, and the beasts and monsters. The monsters look pretty terrible and uninspiring and the animals look half assed. The people are reminiscent of something from 2000-2002. The character models are pretty uninspiring. For example, look at the woman, Kira. She looks horrific with her large, receding hairline and boring facial expressions. And the weather effects: The snow was impressive, but when it rained, the scene looked pretty lackluster. The fog effects where pretty nice. So, as far as graphics go:
Pros: Magnificent backgrounds. Decent weather effects. HDR used in a great manner.
Cons: The character models are horrid looking.
Rating: 7
Now let's get to the sound effects. What do you expect to hear? Swords clanging, monsters roaring, and birds in the background. The music in the game is pretty uninspiring, minus the title music, which is pretty nice. The sound effects are good, as are the ambience of the animals in the background, the sound of wind when it's a windy day, and the weapon sounds are good. The downside to this is that, we can clearly see where the effort on sounds went. It certainly wasn’t on the voice actors. With a game that's fully voiced like TW, you'd expect the VA's to be at least to be decent. However, in this game, the voice acting is pretty awful. I mean most of the villagers sound like they grabbed a random intern, shoved him a line or two, and said 'have at thee'.
Pros: The title music is beautiful. The sound effects are good. Cons: God-awful voice acting. Meh-music.
Rating: 5
Combat is where most of these games tend to make or break and in the case of Two Worlds, the combat is pretty uninspiring. Granted, it's not completely terrible, but at the same time it's nowhere near as good as other games. The combat is repetitive hack and slash with little in the way of tactics. Bow shooting requires near maxed out fast shooting to be effective and no matter how well you build yourself, you will constantly face leveled enemies that either one hit kill you, or enemies that you one hit kill. The fighting system seems like it's nothing more than a mash of mouse pressing. The only real areas of interest in this game are the outright combat and the magic system. Combat goes by quickly because it's hack-hack-hack-kill-kill or die. And magic is so blatantly abusable because of the terrible AI...which I'll get into in a moment. Don't bother trying to become a stealth assassin. Once anything is hit once, everything is all over you. Also, it's near impossible to even approach an enemy and backstab them without out alerting his six million other friends. I do like how there is a pro and con to the different weapons you use.
Pros: Variable weapon skills. Nice passive and active abilities.
Cons: Boring hack and slash gameplay. Useless backstab. Rating: 5
Now I'll get in depth with the AI. In a sandbox game, it's impossible to make dynamic working AI that is representative of each enemy, friend, or otherwise. But at the same time, there needs to be a basic means of AI and the AI of TW is pretty uninspiring. It's not that it's outright stupid and useless...but that's exactly it most of the time. The enemies use whatever pre slotted skills that are on them, according to their levels, and such. It definitely makes fighting enemies that much harder. Archers run away when you run after them and melee chase you down. However, in the case of beasts and such, monster AI is stupid. A grizzly bear goes through a long slashing animation that you can simply sidestep and watch for a good 4-5 seconds before it attacks again. And then after that hit, it takes a good 3-4 seconds more before it swipes at you. Enemies just stand there and swing. They don’t react to dynamic changes...unless you summon a monster. Summons are mostly useful as decoys while you spam magic or slice and dice. My personal favorite example of stupid AI was going into a demon dungeon where everything can one shot me, and casting earth magic chains OR using a golem as a distraction while I snipe it to death with my Ultimate longbow of death with a strength of 1346 and a spirit energy of 1500. Another example: Stand near the entrance to the dungeon and the enemy will stop chasing me and will walk away, giving me free shots at it while it stands there like a blithering dolt.
Pros: The Enemies react...
Cons: ...barely.
Rating: 2
So with AI and combat out of the way, let's get in touch with the gameplay itself. The game is your standard boring, J.R. Tolken swords and sorcery drivel that you'll find an R.A. Salvatore book. The quests are your standard Fed-Ex, assassinate, etc quests that really have been done to death before in games that do them SO much better like KOTOR, NWN, Morrowind, Deus Ex, and OBLIVION (I lasted THIS long before saying the dreaded O word). The characters are so bland that you don't really care what goes on with them. Baldur's Gate had the Mensc guy that everyone creams over. KOTOR had memorable characters like Bastilla Shan, Mission Vao (SP?), Carth, Darth Malak, Darth Treya, Atton, and HK-47 and so on. Morrowind...well...it had M'iaq the liar, Vivec, Almalexia, Cauis Cossades, Dagoth Ur, and a few others who were worth mentioning. Oblivion had...Martin and Sheogorath. That's really it as far as memorable characters in that game. Deus Ex had Tracer Tong, Maggie Chow, Nicollette, Gunter, and so on. This game has NO ONE worth mentioning as far as memorable characters go. Your sister is about it and even then, she's boring. I'm including the story, immersiveness, quests, and such as all parts of gameplay. The villagers are generic, dime a dozen, and are all men. I kid you not. Out of the many places I've been, I've only encountered 3 women: the daughter of a fisher, a female prisoner, and your sister. That's it. All of the NPCs are 30 year old men who look the same. No old people, children, women, teenagers, etc, etc. Just 30 yr old white men. Their quests, as I mentioned before are pretty drab. At least they band together when they see a threat coming toward the village. The immersiveness of the game becomes very hard to stay in. When you explore the wilderness, you feel a part of the game world. However, when you go into a village, asides from how rustic and quaint they look, they come off as lifeless and boring, minus the small scheduling that the developers have put into the NPCs. All and all, the game is at its most fun when you roam around the countryside for no real reason other than to find crap and kill crap. It becomes at its worst when you do quests or, god forbid, actually do the story missions. And my, what a story...that sucks so far...
Pros: Immersive background...
Cons: ...that's marred by the lack of diversity and boringness of the actual quests.
Rating: 5
The story...is terrible so far. Save your sister from an evil man named Reist who wants to do something that if I continue to mention, will spoil and otherwise lame storyline. The morality of good and evil in this game really doesn't come off as good or evil because of the lame voice acting, terrible dialogue, and so on. The story, as far as I've seen in my 9+ hours in, is pretty crap compared to other, more epic games. Hell, if an action-adventurer like Gold of War can make a worthwhile story, then why can't this game? Oye. The O-killer indeed.
Pro: It ends.
Con: ...but you have to suffer through it. >.>
Rating: 3
I've saved the last part of my little tirade/review for the horse itself. I have never ever seen a horse handle as poorly as the one in Two Worlds. I had more responsiveness from the Morrowind mod “If Wishes were Ponies.” Oblivion does not have horse combat. A mod called “Deadly Reflexes” adds execution style finishing moves, dodges, shield stuns, and horse combat. That mod does a better job at horse combat than a game that actually has it built into the engine? The movement on the horse is almost non-existent. When you press forward, it takes about a second before the horse goes forward…and even then, it moves automatically, like an auto run. So, in theory, when you start a horse, it goes into autopilot. Next, the horse has three modes of auto-run: Trot, Gallop, and Sprint. Again, you have no control over the horse other than pressing the forward butting the amount of times it takes to get it in one of those three modes. To stop a horse quickly, you must press the action button, attack, or activate skill. The horse does stop…a second later. If you want to turn the horse around…be prepared to fight with your controls. There is a severe lack of responsiveness that presents your ride from turning around in a timely manner. That, and the horse gets stuck…a lot—between rocks, teleports, hills, buildings, etc. The horse is so badly broken and implemented, that it's not worth using. Also, the game has many glitches that detract from its fun, such as enemies being about to run backwards through a wall, or hill, or a fence while you cannot. Pro: The horse looks good. That's it.
Con: Driv3r handles better than this horse.
Rating: 1
So, in summary, Two Worlds would have been an amazing game I could look past the bugs and uninspired parts in...if this was 2002 and it's only competition was Morrowind and Daggerfall and Deus Ex. This is 2007 and Bloodmoon, KOTOR, Oblivion, and such have upped the ante. Two Worlds delivers on some things and fails miserably on others. The biggest problem with Two Worlds isn't how badly certain things, like the horse, fail. It's that the game, as a whole, is uninspired, tedious, drab, dull, and overall forgettable. That and the whole you cannot die, ever thing, kills any real overall challenge. That and the lame one hit kills you OR the enemy can do on each other.
So, in my opinion, Two Worlds Deserves a 4/10.
0 = It burns, it burns! (Big Rigs) 1 = Horrible. (Extreme Paintball)
2 = Bad. (Driv3r)
3 = Not very good. (Daikatana)
4 = Below-average. (Red Dead Revolver) 5 = Average. (GUN)
6 = Slightly above-average. (Pariah)
7 = Good. (Counter-Strike)
8 = Great. (No One Lives Forever)
9 = Excellent. (Resident Evil 4)
10 = Perfect or damned close. (Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time)