High welcome to my little review of Two Worlds 2. This is based on the 20 hours playing time of the game.
TW1's biggest plus was the completely explorable open world. You could go anywhere you want and in this process you could come across with ruins, caves, temples, etc much like in Elders Scroll and Gothic games (minus 4
). But, this time TW2's world is not big as its predecessor. But this doesn't mean TW2 has less content than TW1. There's enough space for you to explore as you please. And you can come across different dungeons that urges you to explore in this process. Also there's no invisible barriers or such like in Arcania, only the mountains that too steep to climb or sea to swim. There's also swimming in the game, a feature that pleases me so much after playing Arcania. While you can not dive like in the first two Gothics, you can find some caves and other secret places while doing that. Also, while there's jumping in the game, you can't pull yourself up to a cliff or a ledge.
The story is a standart fantasy stuff so far. From the part that I have seen writing is pretty good, there's some humor and sarcasm in the dialogs. But voice acting is somewhere between ok and terrible. Some of the characters were voiced without any emotion and the quality writing took some damage in the process. Main character's 'trying to be cool' voice is becoming annoying after a while. By the way, in dialogs the hand gestures of the characters can sometimes be pretty weird and they don't look straight in the eye to each other.
There're more than one way to solve the quests. It seems devs have tried their best to provide the player different solutions for each quests. For example in Savannah region there's a gate that you have to pass. You can get forgery documents or use a secret smugglers passage to pass the gate. And also there're several ways to get these documents or to learn this secret passage. I don't know some of the choices effect the later part of the game, but it's always better to have more than one options in a RPG.
For me the biggest problem of TW1 was the combat animations. The stiff animations in the first game really took all the fun for me in the first game. With second game I think devs went onto this problem and solved it because combat animations are much more smootly and looks natural now. Instead of swinging the sword plainly main character now making different moves, swinging, slashing, spinning, etc. But, there comes a new problem. Especially fighting with the humanoids are much more easy with constant button mashing. It seems whether you make block break move or normal attack, your rivals can not break your attack. So if you just push the attack button repeatly, you can beat tougher humanoids easily that have much higher levels than you. For a player like me who prefers calculating his every attack even in an action RPG this annoyed me a little. At least, this button mashing tactics can't be applied on non humanoid creatures, so hit and run tactics are much more effective on those.
Leveling system of the game is standard. You gain experience by killing monsters or solving quests, when you gather enough exp you level up, gain some points to distribute between your stats and skills. There're only four primary stats, so there's nothing difficult here. In order to invest some points in a skill, first you have to learn them. You can learn different skills from the books. These skill books can be found in exploration, or bought from a vendor. This provides some kind of challenge to the player and urges him to exploration. Like the first game there's alchemy and metallurgy skills. With metallurgy you can reinforced your weapons and armor with the right materials. Also you can dismantle your excessive stuff into its core materials and use it in future forging attempts. This prevents the overloading of your inventory in the middle of a quest or exploration. Although I have invested some points in alchemy I haven't use one single potion in the game yet. Part of this is because there's a health regeneration system in the game (TW1 didn't have such a system). When you sheath your weapon your health begin to fill no matter you're in a middle of combat or not and a few points in the health regeneration is enough for it. It fills so fast that drinking a health potion is meaningless in the game (at least at the early parts of the game).
Magic system in the game is interesting. There’re cards in the game and with combining these cards you can make lots of different spell combinations.
There're two things that I really hate in RPGs. One level scaling and second respawning of monsters. There's no level scaling in the whole game, so TW2 adopts more traditional approach at this. Also, TW1 had no respawning, but TW2 embrace more sensible approach. Respawning occurs only in the local wild life, but the monsters that you encounter both in the wilderness and dungeons stays dead. So these two aspects of the game win my heart.
There're horses in the game and you can travel on them. But riding the horse is difficult and also there's no fighting on the horse. So each time you see a monster, you have to jump off, kill the beast and then jump back on. At the end it's not practical and I prefered running in my travels instead of riding.
In your travels you can find different books for reading. You may laugh at me, but I like to read every books that I encounter in RPGs. I remember sitting down on my chair and spend hours while reading tales, lores in Morrowind, or codex in Dragon Age Origins. I always think these things deepening the immersion.
As for the graphics the first release of the game didn't have Directx10 graphics and came with an annoying bloom effects. These effects can be so annoying that I was feeling myself in a dream world and my eyes have watered after a while. Also there was no option to close this and only way to do this was the console commands. There was also a problem that AF and parallax mapping couldn't run at the same time. With the 'gold patch' came a Directx 10 mode, ability to close bloom in the options menu. With both AF and parallax mapping graphics really look impressive now. At the same time the optimization is perfect and I haven't seen any slowdowns in the game. By the way, I had a chance to try the game on Xbox 360 and game runs smooth without any slowdown or stuttering. Also apart from above mentioned graphical issues, unlike the first release of TW1, TW2 is pretty bug-free. And at this state I haven't encountered any single bug in the the game.
Apparently being a multi-platform game has some disadventages on PC. First, I don't like the general UI. Default key mapping is terrible, in order to open your inventory you have to press F2, F6 for map, etc. Of course you can adjust that to your liking. But then there's the inventory. It's not much practical and looks ugly. I always prefer TW1's traditional style inventory screen to this.
Anyway if you are a Gothic fan and was dissappointed by the latest Gothic game, Two Worlds 2 has the potential to quench your thirst. It’s the closest thing to Gothic until Risen 2 arrives. I strongly recommend this game to you, I’m sure you won’t be dissappointed with Two Worlds 2.
If you can find the game in the shelves of course. Alas the marketing of the game is terrible and unfortunately publishers are doing all they can to undermine the selling of the game. Two Worlds 3 is in the making, I hope devs can find much beter publisher in the future.
TW1's biggest plus was the completely explorable open world. You could go anywhere you want and in this process you could come across with ruins, caves, temples, etc much like in Elders Scroll and Gothic games (minus 4
). But, this time TW2's world is not big as its predecessor. But this doesn't mean TW2 has less content than TW1. There's enough space for you to explore as you please. And you can come across different dungeons that urges you to explore in this process. Also there's no invisible barriers or such like in Arcania, only the mountains that too steep to climb or sea to swim. There's also swimming in the game, a feature that pleases me so much after playing Arcania. While you can not dive like in the first two Gothics, you can find some caves and other secret places while doing that. Also, while there's jumping in the game, you can't pull yourself up to a cliff or a ledge.The story is a standart fantasy stuff so far. From the part that I have seen writing is pretty good, there's some humor and sarcasm in the dialogs. But voice acting is somewhere between ok and terrible. Some of the characters were voiced without any emotion and the quality writing took some damage in the process. Main character's 'trying to be cool' voice is becoming annoying after a while. By the way, in dialogs the hand gestures of the characters can sometimes be pretty weird and they don't look straight in the eye to each other.
There're more than one way to solve the quests. It seems devs have tried their best to provide the player different solutions for each quests. For example in Savannah region there's a gate that you have to pass. You can get forgery documents or use a secret smugglers passage to pass the gate. And also there're several ways to get these documents or to learn this secret passage. I don't know some of the choices effect the later part of the game, but it's always better to have more than one options in a RPG.
For me the biggest problem of TW1 was the combat animations. The stiff animations in the first game really took all the fun for me in the first game. With second game I think devs went onto this problem and solved it because combat animations are much more smootly and looks natural now. Instead of swinging the sword plainly main character now making different moves, swinging, slashing, spinning, etc. But, there comes a new problem. Especially fighting with the humanoids are much more easy with constant button mashing. It seems whether you make block break move or normal attack, your rivals can not break your attack. So if you just push the attack button repeatly, you can beat tougher humanoids easily that have much higher levels than you. For a player like me who prefers calculating his every attack even in an action RPG this annoyed me a little. At least, this button mashing tactics can't be applied on non humanoid creatures, so hit and run tactics are much more effective on those.
Leveling system of the game is standard. You gain experience by killing monsters or solving quests, when you gather enough exp you level up, gain some points to distribute between your stats and skills. There're only four primary stats, so there's nothing difficult here. In order to invest some points in a skill, first you have to learn them. You can learn different skills from the books. These skill books can be found in exploration, or bought from a vendor. This provides some kind of challenge to the player and urges him to exploration. Like the first game there's alchemy and metallurgy skills. With metallurgy you can reinforced your weapons and armor with the right materials. Also you can dismantle your excessive stuff into its core materials and use it in future forging attempts. This prevents the overloading of your inventory in the middle of a quest or exploration. Although I have invested some points in alchemy I haven't use one single potion in the game yet. Part of this is because there's a health regeneration system in the game (TW1 didn't have such a system). When you sheath your weapon your health begin to fill no matter you're in a middle of combat or not and a few points in the health regeneration is enough for it. It fills so fast that drinking a health potion is meaningless in the game (at least at the early parts of the game).
Magic system in the game is interesting. There’re cards in the game and with combining these cards you can make lots of different spell combinations.
There're two things that I really hate in RPGs. One level scaling and second respawning of monsters. There's no level scaling in the whole game, so TW2 adopts more traditional approach at this. Also, TW1 had no respawning, but TW2 embrace more sensible approach. Respawning occurs only in the local wild life, but the monsters that you encounter both in the wilderness and dungeons stays dead. So these two aspects of the game win my heart.
There're horses in the game and you can travel on them. But riding the horse is difficult and also there's no fighting on the horse. So each time you see a monster, you have to jump off, kill the beast and then jump back on. At the end it's not practical and I prefered running in my travels instead of riding.
In your travels you can find different books for reading. You may laugh at me, but I like to read every books that I encounter in RPGs. I remember sitting down on my chair and spend hours while reading tales, lores in Morrowind, or codex in Dragon Age Origins. I always think these things deepening the immersion.
As for the graphics the first release of the game didn't have Directx10 graphics and came with an annoying bloom effects. These effects can be so annoying that I was feeling myself in a dream world and my eyes have watered after a while. Also there was no option to close this and only way to do this was the console commands. There was also a problem that AF and parallax mapping couldn't run at the same time. With the 'gold patch' came a Directx 10 mode, ability to close bloom in the options menu. With both AF and parallax mapping graphics really look impressive now. At the same time the optimization is perfect and I haven't seen any slowdowns in the game. By the way, I had a chance to try the game on Xbox 360 and game runs smooth without any slowdown or stuttering. Also apart from above mentioned graphical issues, unlike the first release of TW1, TW2 is pretty bug-free. And at this state I haven't encountered any single bug in the the game.
Apparently being a multi-platform game has some disadventages on PC. First, I don't like the general UI. Default key mapping is terrible, in order to open your inventory you have to press F2, F6 for map, etc. Of course you can adjust that to your liking. But then there's the inventory. It's not much practical and looks ugly. I always prefer TW1's traditional style inventory screen to this.
Anyway if you are a Gothic fan and was dissappointed by the latest Gothic game, Two Worlds 2 has the potential to quench your thirst. It’s the closest thing to Gothic until Risen 2 arrives. I strongly recommend this game to you, I’m sure you won’t be dissappointed with Two Worlds 2.
If you can find the game in the shelves of course. Alas the marketing of the game is terrible and unfortunately publishers are doing all they can to undermine the selling of the game. Two Worlds 3 is in the making, I hope devs can find much beter publisher in the future.
