Two Worlds II Review - Learning from their mistakes.

By Sam Coles:

It’s not often that developers learn from their mistakes and produce a good product with a sequel. Two Worlds II is a good example how they learnt from their mistakes and gave us a bigger and better sequel compared to the first game. Here is a bit of a history lesson. The first Two Worlds game was released when there basically no western RPG’s on the Xbox 360 except for Oblivion, so when the game was announced it was immediately compared to The Elder Scrolls IV. The developers said that Two Worlds would put Oblivion to shame and it was ten times the size of Oblivion.

When Two Worlds finally dropped it was a disappointment to say the least as it was plagued with frame issues and poor hit detection. Although this game was poorly received I saw something in it and powered through it and finished it in the summer of 2011, when I heard there was a sequel I picked it up and was stunned with what was produced with the sequel. So let’s go over with what they did right with Two Worlds II.

The story starts with your main character shackled to a chair next to his sister as the great Gandohar is trying to resurrect and ancient Orc god within your sister. It’s not long when you’re rescued by a band of Orcs who take you to their leader and basically tell you Gandohar is evil and you have to stop him. The story isn’t that interesting and your character has a voice like he has been locked in a cellar for 10 years while he chained smoked 200 cigarettes every day, he could be trying to help you and you would still call the police.

Once they let go into the world you’re free to do anything you want whether you want to carry on with the main quest or flesh out your character class, because like Skyrim you’re not chained to one class you can be whatever you want to be. Want to be sword and shield character you can just keeping using said weapons, want to be a rogue type class then use bows and daggers or you can be a mage with probably the most creative magic system I’ve seen in recent years.

Let’s talk about the magic system because it is so amazing what you can do as a mage in this game because if you can think of it you can more than likely create it in the game I would recommend Youtubing Two Worlds II magic and you’ll see some crazy stuff. How the system works is through a card system and they come in a variety of elements and effects so you can combine ice with earth and you end up getting ice balls swirling in a tornado it’s really entertaining to see what you can come up with you can spend a playthrough faffing about with this system.

There is so much to do in this world with side quests or just exploring the environment and see what you can find. There is a deep customisation of your weapons and armour especially with the armour you can make your armour look the way you want it to look through dying it etc. It really feels that the game gives you complete control of how you want to shape your character and doesn’t give you any boring and asinine tutorials of what is recommended.

The presentation is a huge step up from the first game with varied and detailed environments from the hot savannahs at the start of the game to feudal Japan inspired villages and jungles the detail is beautiful and I can just stand there in awe for hours. The music has been given a good boost as well fitting with each area so you’ll have Japanese style music in one area and Egyptian style music when you’re in a representation of the North African deserts. The only thing that stand out that are bad in terms of the presentation are the character models, they are really bad with their sausage links for arms. The presentation as a whole though is fantastic.

The only problems I have with this game the voice acting is still bad, it’s better than the first game where they sound like they’re pretending to act but it’s still bad. Another problem is that sometimes when you teleport and it loads up your character has a habit of locking up and you can’t move at all!

Two Worlds II is a good example of how a sequel should be made by making it bigger and better and you learn from your mistakes and in this game’s case a huge mistake. It’s an apology letter in video game form which I can recommend if you like open world RPG’s. It can be fairly hard to find in shops as I don’t see too often but it’s not expensive.