Two Worlds 2

Back once again. What? Are you still here? You are asking why it has taken me 2 weeks to post a new review instead of 3-4 days? I'm an alcoholic simian, you can't expect me to be dependable and on time. Well as my ex wife used to say when I would ask for sex: "Lets just get this over with."

So what is it this time? Well, anyone that knows me as a gamer knows that I have a major hard-on for RPG's. I grew up playing JRPGs with some weekend DnD sessions on the side then switched exclusively to Western RPGs sometime in my early teens. The bitter truth is that my life is almost completely ruled by Roleplaying games, Rhum-coke and loose women with daddy issues.

Does anyone here know about a game developed by Reality Pump that came out some time in 2007 called Two Worlds? If you don't then I envy you, and if you do then I don't need to tell you about how it was one of those "love it or hate it" games.

Just like marmite: No one has a neutral opinion and mine is that you fucking disgust me.

Now, before you run off screaming into the night let me assure you: I am not going to review *that* steaming pile of fecal matter. Instead I am going to present you with it's successor, the very stupidly named Two Worlds 2.

Yes, apparently the marketing geniuses never realized how silly it would sound and in true Polish fashion decided to make the original name so incompatible with sequels that it actually sounds like pure win.

Two Worlds 2 takes place right after the end of the first game. You play the same character with the same useless plot point of a sister. In the first game you started with your sister being kidnapped and in this one you start with you and her being tortured by a dude that looks very much like something an emo teen would come up with as a cool Final Fantasy Boss idea. Between the deep voice, black armor and red cape and hood this guy is really pushing far into the cliché villain territory.

The only thing he is missing is a mustache, monocle and top hat.

After a little cutscene, you are thrown into the dungeon, the two guards escorting you are promtly killed by a woman looking like a cross between a ninja and a stripper who tells you that she is there on behalf of some Orcs to rescue you. What follows from here is one of the longest tutorials I have ever played.

However this is not a bad thing. It is one of the longest tutorials I have ever played but also one of the best. At no point does it feel tacked on or hamfisted.

Escaping the dungeon makes you learn the basics of movement, lockpicking and fighting. After the escape you find yourself on an island which will double as your home base. In order to get to the mainland you will need to fix the island's teleporter. While doing so you are presented with the basics of stealth, advanced fighting with both melee/ranged weapons and magic.

Before you leave you will even be presented with the game's interesting crafting system. Now I really must praise the developers for their impressive work on this part. The first 1-2 hours of the game is a tutorial that is designed so perfectly that you at no point feel like you are doing anything outside of what feels natural, all the while learning to master every aspect of gameplay completely. On top of that, it is all presented at such a reasonable pace that you never feel like you are being overwhelmed with new information.

Hurr Durr....Lol wut? Wut war?

Actual information is very sparse though. Lorewise the game gives you almost no explanations for many things. Cultures, past wars, allies and enemies. It pretty much assumes that you played the first game and learned it all there and never bothers giving you any background info to anything at all.

This might be fine for people that played the first game but for new players it just leaves you going "what the fuck?" half of the time when characters refer to past events, people or cultural history.

Without going much into spoiler territory, the plot is pretty straight forward, bad guy has sister held captive. Save sister and kill bad guy. Folks it does not get more simple than this. Even Sean Penn in full on "I am Sam" mode could figure it out. But it works.

Just like other open world RPGs the game follows the same formula of having a generic story with plot points here and there, with the real meat of the game being it's huge open enviroment and countless little side quests.

I'm sailing awaaaay. Set at open course for the virgin sea......

If you have played any Elder Scrolls game then this will feel very familiar. The world of Antaloor is quite varied and interesting, featuring a huge open ocean to sail, deserts, swampland, small cities with their own completely different individual styles and lots of random dungeons to explore.

The critters found in Antaloor were a very pleasant surprise as well. The first third of the game takes place in a large landmass that is very much like an African Safari. Kind of like if you stuck an RPG into Far Cry 2 which makes for a very fresh feel.

Instead of giant rats or wolves or any other generic RPG low level fodder we have Baboons, Ostriches, Giant Ants and Shamanistic barbarians with jackal heads. Also special mention goes out to Raptors. I fucking love Raptors and any kid that grew up watching Jurrassic Park does as well. Sadly I still haven't figured out how to ride one...yet.

DO WANT!

The graphics are nothing to write home about, Two Worlds 2 is by no means an ugly game, but it's definately not a pretty one. The graphics feel dated and bland, though not as bland as the voice acting. Voice acting in the first game was notoriously bad, giving the impression that a retard with a speech impediment had decided to start talking like Shakespeare.

This time around they dropped all the thee's and thou's and improved the actual voice acting significantly. It still sounds like a group of high school drama class idiots are on the other side of the recording mic but considering the last game, that's like comparing eating shit to just having it thrown at you. Trust me, I know from experience that the second option is totally the way to go.

Your own character uses a very gravelly "trying to sound like a badass voice" that sort of reminds me of what a skinny nerd would sound like when trying to emulate Vin Diesel. I could get over this if not for the fact that every conversation is so badly animated that it becomes hilarious.

Whenever your character has a conversation, he will wave his arms around randomly from time to time. Shrugging his shoulders or making gestures. All of this is so unnatural that it feels like you are watching a retard with Parkinson's try to sound like Riddick while asking a villager how he can help solve their troubles or asking a guard for directions.

Controls are a tad clunky on the Xbox 360 and a little better on the PC,  nothing too extreme though and after a few hours you get comfortable with it and it all flows quite well. Special mention goes to mounts though, you can ride a horse in the game but the only time you would want to put yourself through that torture is for the specific quests that need it.

I hate you. The moment PETA isn't looking I'm gonna cut off your legs and make glue.

The horse riding controls are so skull-fuckingly, cunt-fartingly terrible that most people would cross the map on foot rather than ride a bloody horse. Thankfully there are plenty of teleport pads spread generously around the world that you never really need to do a lot of backtracking between places once you find them.

The game itself follows a very free-form way of building your character, you of course start with character appearance customization which is very decent, even going so far as letting you configure your height. The game is filled with nice little touches like this. You can even dye your clothes and armor in the game to fit how you want your hero to look. Small things like that go a hell of a long way towards making a game feel great.

There are no fixed classes in the game and as you level up you can freely pick and choose what to invest points into, choosing to either specialize in one aspect of gameplay or becoming a hybrid of anything you may think is useful or interesting.

Magic deserves it's own little section apart from the rest of the general gameplay description. Magic works with cards. You have base cards which choose what type a spell is, whether it is Projectile, Area, Summoning, or Effect.

Elemental cards which choose what the general effect is such as fire, necromancy, water, etc. Then there are minor cards which control bonuses such as multiplying the effects, projectiles bouncing off surfaces, splitting into multiple projectiles on contact, or simply lasting longer or adding defense or damage.

A few examples would be like a fireball that bounces off walls and splits into a new fireball every time it hits an enemy creating a clusterfuck of flames flying back and forth in a group of monsters. Or mixing a water card with an effect card and a time card to have a spell which lets you walk on water. A spell can change drastically just by adding or removing a single card.

At one point I figured out how to make a fireball that left a poison damage over time effect on any enemy it hit as well as splitting into 2 new fireballs and summoning a stone golem everytime it would bounce off of the floor or walls.

Why? Because I could. Fuck rules and being overpowered. Once you start experimenting with magic in this game, the results are almost endless. Most seem to make some sort of twisted sense but really at the end of the day most just feel random and totally awesome by extension.

If only every game gave me such freedom. I would never leave my apartment.

Spell card combos are not permanently set. You can edit their names and switch around any cards you want any time. This leads to totally unhindered experimentation without annoying costs or reset effort on the part of players. 

Same goes for what abilities you invest in, for a small price you can reset your character's skill points to an earlier stage and redistribute them. This design promotes freedom of character development to perfection and lets us just enjoy the many paths of customization unlike so many other RPGs out there that seemingly punish players for not planning ahead properly or wanting to change their previous choices.

So far I have only described the single player aspect of the game. There is a multiplayer online component by the way and it features 2 (you heard me. TWO. I'm not counting the PvP which technically brings it up to THREE) different forms of gameplay.

One is the story mode in which you get a semi-linear large map and go from point A to point B while killing everything in your way. You do these maps with other totally random players and its pretty much up to you to work as a team.

You can do it solo as well but it feels slow and is really built to be tackled by a group considering the difficulty of the creatures in any given area. Just like in the single player campaign you create a character (you can not use your single player character) only instead of being forced to be human, here you are allowed to pick from other races such as Orcs, Elves, etc.

Every level of the multiplayer campaign has a small town at the start to stock up on, buy new gear and sell loot before going on to tackle the cave, forest or tomb featured. It pretty much feels very much like a multiplayer online version of Champions of Norrath and is very enjoyable.

You can call it online play, I'll stick with homoerotic gaming from all the long hard objects entering other men.

Eventually once you have earned a certain amount of gold from the campaign you can use it to buy a town. This brings us to a totally new gameplay feature that feels something like if you took one of those Facebook town builder games.

You have a very large map with outlying forest and farmland. You can put up shops and taverns and farms. Depending on what you put up, your town will earn money or even cost you money thanks to how you set up the taxes in conjunction with upkeep and actual profit. With the right setup you can collect a very huge amount of gold almost daily just from spare tax money that is hanging around and not being used.

You need to keep a good balance between these things, making sure that your people are happy with enough food, fair taxation and guard posts and other creature comforts like a tavern or shops. Shop stocks are even affected by things like having a blacksmith, tannery or other supply buildings. From time to time your town will also face outside threats which your Majordomo will warn you about, prompting you to go out and kill whatever is making your home unsafe.

Other players and friends can also enter your town and if they buy and sell at your shops can give a short term boost to the profits your town makes. You even get your own little home where you can store all the random loot you get during the multiplayer and don't feel like selling but don't feel like carrying around either.

Hoarding is a genuine mental condition, like being a man and peeing sitting down.

It's hard to try to get this all down in one single review as there is so much you can experience in Two Worlds 2. If you were a fan of the first game then this one will fly lightyears beyond what anyone could have ever hoped for in a sequel. Even if like me, you hated the first game with a passion there is still a pretty good chance that you will find at least a few things to enjoy in this title and really grow to like it.

Though it suffers from a few bad design choices and some of the budget constraints are obvious, Two Worlds 2 is a very decent RPG and proves that the series has great potential. The first game may have felt like a complete disaster, this feels almost like a flawed masterpiece.

If Reality Pump can learn to iron out some of the kinks, improve the animations and voice acting, fix their controls and perhaps provide a more serviceable presentation then this company could very well go on to become a contender against Bioware and Bethesda in the RPG Gaming Arena. Unlike it's predecessor, Two Worlds 2 actually deserves a purchase and is sure to provide RPG fans with many hours of enjoyment.

Lose the douche in the middle, show moar bewbs and we are golden.