Two Worlds Review
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As a result, you're probably going to die a lot in Two Worlds, but, luckily, there isn't really any penalty for death. Each time you die, you simply appear at a health shrine. You don't leave a corpse, you don't drop any gold, and you don't lose any experience. And since there are health shrines all over the place, death only means that you have to waste a little time running back to where you were, and it means that you can win any fight, just by repeatedly throwing yourself at it. You might die ten times, but so what? (Note: There's a little bit of sarcasm there. Any system that allows you to defeat an enemy by dying multiple times yourself seems silly to me, and dying over 100 times in a game takes some of the realism out of it.) The Campaign
Two Worlds has sort of an odd campaign. What makes it odd is that the required components are short and sort of unfulfilling. Early in the game you're told to collect five pieces of an ancient relic, but the pieces aren't particularly hard to reach. The first time I acquired one of the pieces there was so little fanfare that I didn't even realize what I had done. Then after you've acquired the five pieces, it's off to the final battle. In other words, the main storyline only updates twice -- once at the beginning and once at the end -- and the rest of the game involves spending 30-50 hours building up your character by completing side quests. I can't think of another game where the ratio of main quests to side quests was so lopsided in favor of the side quests.
Fortunately, the side quests are pretty well done. As an example, at one point you're walking by a cave, and you see a man out front. When you talk to him, he tells you that a thief stole his ring and ran into the cave. The cave is full of skeletons, and when you reach the thief, he tells you that the skeletons were put there to protect him from intruders, but that they've started attacking him now as well. The thief will then make you a deal: if you can find the necromancer who raised the skeletons and convince him to fix the problem, he'll give you the ring. The necromancer, of course, will also have a task for you, and so on. The side quests are often nicely linked in this way, and they do a good enough job of bringing the world and its conflicts to life.
What doesn't really work in the campaign is the prestige system. There are seven factions in the game (including the merchant's guild and the necromancers), and by completing side quests for them, you gain prestige with them. The problem is, the system doesn't really do anything or go anywhere. The merchant's guild gives you better prices if they like you, but most factions don't give you any sort of reward, and if you destroy one faction at the request of another, the world doesn't change. When I went to the necromancer town and killed the head necromancer, not only did the other necromancers in the town not attack me, they didn't even act like anything had happened. This part of the game seems unfinished at best.
Conclusion
There are more good things and bad things about the game, but they tend to balance each other out. For example, I liked the graphics engine and how Reality Pump added some nice visual touches, like slightly blurring objects in the distance to give the world a better sense of depth. But then I hated everything about horse riding, and I have no idea why Reality Pump didn't just use the same WASD system for moving horses that they used for moving people. Instead, you have to (guide) your horse, but every time I tried to do that, I ended up galloping off nowhere near where I wanted to go, and I had absolutely no luck in trying to fight while mounted, and so I ended up walking everywhere.
In other words, Two Worlds is a mediocre game. Nothing about it is awful, but nothing about it works particularly well, either. I knew I was in some trouble when I watched the opening movie, and I had no idea that the guy featured there was supposed to be my character, since they didn't look anything alike (this despite the fact that you can't do a lot during character creation to change your appearance). Two Worlds is just riddled with problems like that, where a little more polish and a little more effort would have gone a long way.
As it stands now, Two Worlds is a badly balanced, awkwardly controlled, but nice looking game. If you enjoyed the Gothic games or even the post-patch version of Dungeon Lords, then you might want to give it a try, but for most people I'd recommend that you skip it or wait for the price to come down. Two Worlds feels a lot more like a $20 game to me than it does a $50 game.
