Is Two Worlds II in for a world of hurt?
In a land wrecked with evil, where you once tried to free the land now you find yourself imprisoned… until help arrives from the most unexpected quarter. The plot of Two Worlds II is on the basic side and isn’t anything new…you’re captured and you need to rescue your sister from an evil Overlord. But what of the game itself?
Well, I never played the original Two Worlds but noticed that it didn’t exactly get a warm reception from critics. On face value, you’d think this is a game much like Oblivion, but this isn’t quite as fun to play…the interface leaves a lot to be desired, controlling your character is also quite awkward and the less said about the voice-acting, the better.
It’s not terrible, but you would think that given the development time involved, the game would look half-decent on a console…but instead it looks like a really old PC game. The world of Antaloor may be large in scale, but the world itself feels empty and devoid of charm. Two Worlds II does the traditional RPG elements well, but it doesn’t quite take things to the next level that I hoped the sequel would achieve.
Combat is poor, despite some rather nice light and magic effects. I guess the real problem is that Two Worlds II doesn’t know what it wants to be and becomes sloppy as a result. The controls are also poor as the Left Trigger seems to do everything including running, walking stealthily and aiming. There’s also a huge difficulty aspect to the game that will see you get killed a LOT, meaning abusing the save system is your only way for victory.
Quests tend to be a basic mixture of gathering and killing, which tends to get repetitive after a while, which is a shame as there are some good ideas to be found like the craft system and multiplayer which pits you against your friends or to work together across quests, as well as doing up towns in a homage to Animal Crossing, but it clearly isn’t enough to make any gamer overlook the huge flaws that the game has.
The game looks incredibly dated and the gameplay feels about the same. Voice-acting is atrociously bad, while the music isn’t too bad. The basic animations for your character such as in combat and jumping are incredibly poor by today’s standards.
The Verdict
Two Worlds II is very difficult, it lacks charm, and it looks about 10 years old, plus it handles poorly. It had some promise in its ideas, but none can make up for these problems. If you can overlook them, then you might find it enjoyable…but you need to deliberately search out the good parts in-between the great number of bad ones.
