Two Worlds Review

Introduction

Usually when I play a role-playing game, the title of the game makes perfect sense. For example, when I played Titan Quest and World of Warcraft, the titles were pretty indicative of what I was going to get, at least thematically. But then there are some games where the title is a head-scratcher. Consider Sacred. When I played that game a couple of years ago, I couldn’t figure out where the title came from, and I always wondered if the title made sense at some point in the game’s development, or if the developer just liked the word and thought it would look good on a game box, sort of like when George Eastman came up with the name Kodak for his new camera (he simply liked the letter (k)).

Add to the latter list the game Two Worlds from developer Reality Pump. As far as I can tell, the title of the game doesn’t have anything to do with anything. There aren’t two worlds in the game, and the single-player campaign deals with Aziraal, the dead god of war. Some people in the (one) world want to bring him back to life, but you’re not with them. You think the (one) world is a better place with him dead. However, a shady group of individuals manages to gain some leverage over you by kidnapping your sister, and they force you to hunt for the five pieces of an ancient relic that can bring the dead god back to life. The campaign then deals with you exploring the (one) world and tracking down the pieces of the relic, before finally confronting the shady group and their evil god. So how do you get Two Worlds from that? I have no idea.

Character Development

Despite Two Worlds not having much in the way of a storyline, in the single-player campaign you’re forced to play a human male character whose skill set doesn’t match any of the game’s 12 official classes (in multiplayer, you can also be a female or an elf, and you have to pick a class). Your character is sort of an everyman character, with an assortment of skills for melee combat, ranged combat, and magic. Later, as you visit towns during your travels, you can learn new skills to make your character even more versatile.

Skills include abilities like Strong Hand, which increases the amount of melee damage you do, and Disarming Arrow, which disarms opponents from afar (and which is really a pain when it’s done to you). There are also thief skills for sneaking, stealing, and picking locks, and a Riding skill for riding horses and other mounts. Magic is also considered to be a skill. There are five schools of magic, and as you put more skill points into each school, you’re allowed to cast the higher level spells in the school. The damage done by spells isn’t controlled by your skill level, though. Instead, the magic system uses cards, where the more cards you play, the more damage you do. There are also booster cards that you can use to reduce the mana cost of a spell, increase the duration of a spell, and more.

Each time your character gains a level, you receive five attribute points to spend on your attributes (strength, dexterity, vitality, and willpower) and one skill point to spend on your skills. You also get skill points for passing certain thresholds (for example, by killing enough enemies or by picking open enough locks), and some quests reward you with skill points as well. Moreover, there is an alchemy component to the game, where you can brew potions for your character, and it’s pretty easy to brew potions that add permanent bonuses to your attributes. As a result, while your character starts out weak (boars in particular killed me easily), by the end of the game you’re way more powerful than anything else, and combat is pretty much a joke. When I got to the final boss, I killed him in two hits, and the spell he cast didn’t damage me at all.

Mechanics

In Two Worlds you control a single character. The game uses a third-person perspective (the camera sits over your shoulder), and you use the WASD keys to move and the mouse to steer. Left-clicking the mouse causes you to attack with your weapon, and right-clicking the mouse causes you to use a designated special attack or spell. Whenever you reach an interactive item (such as an NPC to talk to or a chest to open), the spacebar is what you use to start the interaction. The control system is pretty standard, but if you don’t like the way something works, you can always configure the keys to your liking.

There is a certain amount of dialogue in Two Worlds, but mostly what you do in the game is fight things. Enemies start out as forest creatures, like wolves and boars, but then they eventually progress to orcs and demons and even dragons. Unfortunately, the combat system doesn’t work very well. You can’t strafe or block, and the “S” key causes you to turn around and walk away rather than walk backwards, and so once you enter into combat (usually against three or more opponents at once) there isn’t a lot you can do other than swing away and hope for the best. Worse, developer Reality Pump apparently had no idea what an end-game character might look like, and so the healing potions available in the game aren’t nearly powerful enough. My character ended up with 30,000 hit points, but the best healing potion only heals 1000 hit points, and so potions were basically useless in combat.

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.