Two Worlds review (Xbox 360)

It’s very rare that the opening sequence of a game can leave the viewer truly speechless. However, Two Worlds, from Polish developers Reality Pump, achieved just such a dubious honour.

I literally sat slack-jawed in amazement, wondering how any company in their right mind would release a game wherein the opening sequence is so unutterably bad that it would cause the kind of dumbfounded reaction in a player that I experienced. I showed the game to others, eliciting an identical reaction each and every time. No-one wanted to have anything to do with the thing thereafter, including me. Unfortunately, I was duty bound to give it a shot or, to put it another way, to give Two Worlds enough rope to hang itself.

Gosh

By now, you’ve probably read numerous review scores for Two Worlds that must make for tough viewing back in Poland. This vast, sweeping high fantasy RPG has taken a hammering in the press and, to be honest, quite justifiably. It’s a game that got me very angry indeed principally because, underneath the dreadful presentation and largely massively unfriendly interface, there are many decent ideas and a huge amount of gameplay. OK, so the ideas and gameplay are nothing new (>cough<Oblivion>cough<), but at least they are there.

I wanted to play! I wanted to explore! I wanted to enjoy myself! But the game wouldn’t let me. There was a constant, Jim Bowen-like presence standing at my shoulder saying "Here’s what you could have played!" then taking it away from me. Very frustrating.

Golly

The plot is simple enough. You play a mercenary whose sister (a tacky vampish Goth in the Cleo Rocco/Elvira style) gets kidnapped by some lumpy bad guys who are looking for a relic that has been broken up into handy collectible pieces by your ancestors to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. Your primary purpose is to recover the bits, stick ‘em all back together, defeat the baddies, and so on. As well as the main quest, which involves infiltrating various guilds and factions, there are numerous little side quests and lots of places to explore.

Linking the locations around the world is a system of teleports that you activate pretty early on. Each one you find means you can quickly get back to a place you’ve already visited when a mission demands backtracking. You have the chance to use a horse, but going on foot allows you to pick up potion ingredients as you go and explore at a more leisurely pace.

Oh, and going on foot is hugely preferable to going anywhere using the uncontrollable hell that is a horse. In fact, repeatedly smashing your hand in a door is hugely preferable to trying to ride a horse in Two Worlds. Yes, I know the skill can be developed, but there really, really is no point at all in doing so.

Wow!

The horse is just one example of the game sabotaging itself. Oddly, the camera works just fine, but pretty much everything else is horribly, stupidly, obstinately unpleasant.

Combat is overly simple thanks to the ability to dodge the clearly telegraphed attacks of your opponents. If, somehow, you can’t get the hang of this, don’t worry – death in this game has absolutely no consequence and, indeed, is regularly beneficial. When you die, you are immediately resurrected at a (usually) nearby shrine, with no loss of items or stats, even if you’ve never been there before. This can unlock new locations (gaining achievement points) and provide an opportunity to screw up the combat system utterly. Simply have the bad guys follow you back to a shrine, then stand within its influence and hack away to your heart’s content. Your opponents never have the benefit of the shrine’s healing powers, so will eventually fall. You can do the same in underground levels too.

This makes the quests easier, though that’s then broken by the random nature of the game. On quite a few occasions during the hours I put into this wretched game (a little more than six, I think), I would finish a side quest and return to those who had set it only to have them attack me for no discernible reason. I’d obviously done something, but the ‘something’ was never revealed to me but did serve to bugger up my quest.

Oooh!

On one occasion, I took on a side quest from a roadside merchant. A little later I came back and saw an icon to one side near a bush that said I could pick something up. Assuming it was a medicinal plant, I did so. In fact, I’d just picked the pocket of my merchant friend. Enraged, he now follows me for hours each time I pass him, intent on doing me damage. Quest buggered.

On another occasion, I entered a small settlement and followed some guys into a house. I was immediately accused of breaking and entering and was run out of town. That buggered up two quests. It also nicely illustrates the fact that, for a lot of the game, things keep happening by accident. This is not good gameplay, as it leaves players completely confused.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the character you’re playing regularly knows more about what’s going on than you do. Not long after I’d been run out of the afore mentioned settlement, I happened upon one of the lumpy bad guys, only in white this time, not black. My character growled a satisfied “At last!”, and then I was attacked and one-hit-killed by the knobbly stranger whom I should obviously have recognised immediately.

Amazing!

The lead character in the game has an amazing effect on plants. Everywhere you go outside, new growth springs up around your feet! A miracle? Nope, just lousy pop-up (the worst I’ve seen since Bullet Witch) that defies explanation considering the woeful graphics and the regular and intrusive loading freezes, sometimes heralded by a spinning-disc icon and sometimes not at all. Oh, and the frame rate will make you ill if you are susceptible to such things.

The last thing likely to put you off playing Two Worlds, once you’ve got past the PS1 graphics, has got to be the dialogue and the delivery of said dialogue. Everything is in mock-medieval, with a hey-nonny-nonny and a verily, forsooth and gadzooks. It is so badly written that it’s no surprise that the voice talent delivers the lines with all the emotion of a house brick. Perhaps they too had to listen to the low-rent Enya music that makes up the soundtrack. Whatever the case, the result is unintentionally funny at best, and outright obscure at worst – even with subtitles.

Unbelievable!

I put a fair bit of time into playing Two Worlds for this review. By the end, I was almost enjoying myself. Almost, because the presentation and controls of the game just kept getting in the way. For everything good – the alchemy system, for example, or the way you combine similar items to make stronger items – there were two or three critically bad bits that just made the game impossible to really get into.

In the end, Two Worlds is a bit like when you know there’s a five pound note hidden under a pile of rancid, squishy, steaming manure – sure, you’d like the money, but is it really worth wading through all that poop to get to it?