I despised the original Two Worlds. It still ranks among my most hated titles on the Xbox 360. It was such an atrocity I’m surprised the video game industry didn’t put Reality Pump on trial for war crimes. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to review the sequel, excited to see what kind of torture the developers could deliver me. So color me shocked that Two Worlds 2 actually turned out to be a damn good RPG.
It would be easy for me to compare Two Worlds 2 to games like Oblivion, Diablo, and World of Warcraft, because it borrows heavily from all these franchises in a majority of ways. Instead I’m going to compare the game to Raymond Babbitt. That’s right: Two Worlds 2 is the video game equivalent of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. It is an idiot savant among role playing games. When I began reviewing it I expected very little. The initial hour provided a lackluster tutorial where your character escapes from a prison (how many times is an RPG going to begin like this?!) and walks you through the game’s most basic mechanics. At this point I was still underwhelmed, but then right around the end of the tutorial, the hints of brilliance began to emerge.
The first impressive feature was my character gaining an “occulus”; a disembodied floating eyeball that acts as a first person free roaming camera to scout the landscape ahead of you. It’s an interesting, well-implemented feature to help stealth classes, and later occuli allow you to not only view enemies, but also damage them using remote detonation. This had me leaning towards playing an assassin, because the standard melee combat felt stiff and basically revolved around mashing one button, and magic (besides summoning) is fairly underpowered for the first 80% of the game. However, class choice brought another great feature of TW2 to light. The class system is highly malleable. I created an assassin/ranger/mage class, which I dubbed “assrage”. My assrage was able to dump points into any number of skills, regardless of class, tailoring him to my exact playstyle. I also took advantage of the “soulpatchers” who allow you to re-spec your entire build for a nominal fee, a feature akin to many MMOs.
The trappings of the MMORPG aren’t limited to just character builds however. TW2 features a robust crafting system unlike anything I’ve seen in a console RPG before. You can literally break down any item you get into core components, allowing you to upgrade your current equipment and further enhance it with magic gems. This freedom extends to the alchemy and magic systems as well, allowing almost unlimited flexibility for tweaking and creation as long as your character meets the skill point requirements. It creates a wonderful feeling of freedom as you play, and let’s you mix things up on a whim should you choose to. The only drawback to this is the somewhat unwieldy inventory menu, which has a terrible translucent background making it difficult to read and select items in most well-lit areas of the game. I implore Reality Pump to patch in a solid background for the inventory menu because it would make a world of difference, pun intended.
The overall visual quality of the game was another point of contention for me. The environments are highly detailed and well designed. Being a huge Guild Wars fan, the game immediately earned points with me by opting for Asian and African themed landscapes. It was far more interesting exploring a dry savannah, feudal Japanese styled structures, and a murky cursed swamp, than the standard “forest and castle” areas I’ve generally come to expect in the typical ARPG. The character models are a different story though. While they were somewhat detailed and there were a few interesting enemy designs, they moved stiffly and generally seemed uninspired. Sound was another mixed bag. The soundtrack is superb and well orchestrated, while the voice acting is completely over the top and ridiculous. I personally enjoyed it because it was light and humorous, and anyone who is a fan of shows like “Hercules”, “Xena”, and “Legend of The Seeker” will immediately fall in love with Antaloor’s inhabitants. But if you prefer your games to be deadly serious, you’ll immediately hate them and wonder how many sandwiches the developers bought their local community theater group to record the dialogue.
The humor infused into the game doesn’t really shine through in the main story, which is fairly run-of-the-mill. The real quality is in the side-quests which range from lengthy dungeon crawls to ridiculous battles with cursed umbrellas. It’s these that bring the world to life and make you want to spend countless hours exploring, and generally ignoring the main path. Unfortunately the quest log is also full of dubious design decisions, such as leaving all completed quests on it, making it needlessly difficult to read. The map is also fairly cumbersome, using a system of pushpins that become cluttered after you’ve been inundated with tons of quests. UI failings aside, the diligent adventurer could easily spend over sixty hours exploring every nook and cranny of Antaloor while completing it’s massive chains of side quests.
This brings me to the final outstanding feature of this game, that being the multiplayer co-op campaign. I have to admit, I was totally unprepared for this hidden gem. What started as me checking out the multiplayer simply to say that I played it, turned into two days of powering through an amazing independent campaign. You create a completely different character with much more flexibility in looks, gender, and race. Then you and up to seven other people play across seven chapters as an aspiring henchmen of the single player campaign’s main villain. It’s a highly linear, hack n’ slash dungeon run that evokes Diablo and shades of D&D. Fighters in the front, archers in the back, keep the mage alive while he fires magic missiles. It’s totally old school and totally awesome. Chapters are re-playable, and you’ll want to collect as much cash as you can, because once your coffers reach 10,000 auras (gold) you unlock “Village mode”, which is your very own medieval hamlet building simulator. It’s persistent and events happen in real time. Think of it as Farmville to scale, only if you ignore it everyone gets murdered by skeletons in the night. There are also a few PVP modes, but griefing is already abundant, so I would only recommend them for the hardcore trophy/achievement hunters who are willing to take several frustrating beatings for the sake of completionism.
Two Worlds 2 is far from perfect. In fact, it has many flaws and some really strange design choices. I’m not going to gauge it based on being better than its predecessor, because that would be like awarding a car company for rolling out their new model that doesn’t spontaneously combust. However, based on its own merit, this is a solid game. It allows a kind of player freedom I haven’t experienced since Morrowind, and it’s obvious that the developers really love classic RPG’s. It’s not for everyone, but for players who have the patience to look beyond some of its outward problems, there is an incredible wealth of original content to explore and enjoy.
The Good
- Game world is interesting and well designed.
- Crafting system is second to none for a console RPG.
- Soundtrack is outstanding and sets the tone nicely.
- Controls can be frustrating.
- Map and inventory need an overhaul.
- Your characters one-liners get old, fast.
- Not nearly enough Sordahon.
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