Two Worlds

Rating ESRB: Teen Genre action Publisher Southpeak Interactive External Links Southpeak Interactive

Two Worlds is an open-ended action role-playing game that allows players to more or less create their own story as they go through the game. Sadly, though, most of those stories aren’t very good. To get into Two Worlds, you have to have an enjoyment for games that fall within the ‘fantasy’ realm. If you are not a fan of Fable, Elder Scrolls, or anything along those lines, then let me advise you to stay away from this one.

Set in the fictitious Kingdom of Cathalon, you play as the game’s hero (or, if you choose, villain). At the start of a new game, players are expected to create a new character using a very generic, bland template. You decide on everything about your character, from their eye color to their height and weight. But, no matter what you do, every character is basically the same. Options are minimal and don’t really give players a range of choices on how they can create a unique focal point to the game.

Once a player is created, you are then subjected to watching a lengthy cut scene. Typically, I would skip over this because I have the attention span of a small, hyper child. But watching this, it was clear that a lot of time and money was not devoted to good, quality voice acting. There were moments during the opening montage that I found myself actually laughing out loud at some of the poor delivery from the characters.

After the lengthy cut scene, players are then prompted by commands explaining the controls of the game. I found the control scheme to be one of the high points of Two Worlds. Players can brandish their weapons, cast spells and swap items with great ease. Moving about and navigating through item menus is simple and requires very little time.

Graphically, Two Worlds isn’t bad, but it’s not great. Cut scenes show great detail, but once gameplay begins, the graphics get choppy and less clear. Striking an opponent with the blade of your sword produces a red, pixilated mess that flies up in the air and vanishes. With such subpar graphics, you would think that loading issues wouldn’t be a problem. Alas, within the first ten minutes of my playing through Two Worlds, there was lag due to graphical loading. Throughout the course of playing for several hours, there were still times when graphics would drag and even freeze temporarily as the terrain loaded. Even graphical glitches popped up, including my character, Sir Lemonpants, freezing in mid air for some inexplicable reason for nearly ten seconds.

Gameplay is challenging and fun at times, but also very, very frustrating. The open-ended nature of the game gives players endless possibilities. It’s nice to know that you can either opt to ransack a small villagers house or overtake the throne of the land to save the villagers. However, enemies become almost too challenging to handle, even on the easier settings. Large swarms of enemies descend upon your player, giving you little wiggle room to fight, let alone survive their attacks. And even those creatures that are not enemies can kill you almost instantaneously. Remember how in the older Zelda games, you could swing your sword at the town’s chickens? And how after a while of striking one, it would become belligerent and summon dozens of chickens to fly at you, causing you to lose one health point or so? It was a funny little thing you could do that didn’t do too much damage. In Two Worlds, you can do similar things to hogs. The only difference is that three hogs, as opposed to dozens, may attack you. The biggest difference is that those three hogs and their headbutts can actually kill you! Not so fun to attack the livestock now, is it?

The deep, yet sporadically difficult gameplay makes Two Worlds too inconsistent to be considered a top-tier game for the Xbox 360. If these problems were cleaned up, Two Worlds would be a serious contender for one of the best games on the 360. The open-endedness of the game leaves a variety of possibilities. Sadly though, navigating through these possibilities proves to be too big of a hassle.