Two Worlds II – Review

Two Worlds II arrived without much fanfare, following an original title that wasn’t particularly well regarded. The development team seemed aware of that reputation and set out to fix and improve the problems that plagued the first game. The good news is that they succeeded in making Two Worlds II a better game overall. The bad news is that it still suffers from a number of technical problems.

Despite those issues, there’s a lot to enjoy here. Two Worlds II is an open-world RPG, inviting comparisons to titles like Oblivion and the Fallout series. The open-world design holds up well, and there are plenty of side quests to keep players busy for a long stretch — the kind of game that appeals to completionists, since rushing through the main story alone risks missing quite a bit.

Those two aspects define Two Worlds II: on one hand, certain areas are a technical mess; on the other, the sheer amount of side content to explore makes it easy to overlook those shortcomings.

Anyone playing the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 version on a television will immediately notice a problem: on a first playthrough, not everything shows up on screen. A mini-map, for instance, can sit entirely off-screen without any indication it’s even there. The fix is to go into the Graphics settings and enable “Use Safe Area In Interface,” after which everything displays correctly. Why that isn’t the default setting is baffling, but at least it’s a quick fix. Reality Pump clearly put a lot of work into the new engine but didn’t fully optimize it. There are moments where the scenery is breathtaking — standing on a cliff overlooking water, or looking up at a starry night sky — and other moments of bad graphical pop-in or serious framerate drops. The game is massive, and transporters are used constantly to get around quickly, but every transport hits the framerate hard, occasionally dropping to a near slideshow. Entering a city could mean standing frozen for a good twenty seconds while buildings pop into place around a similarly frozen population, evoking the “paused” scene from The Matrix. Once everything loads, the game runs fine, though the transition is jarring each time. This didn’t happen on every occasion, but often enough to be worth flagging. Auto-saving causes a similar stutter, sometimes freezing mid-battle for a few moments — a useful feature that would benefit from not locking everything up while it works.

None of that makes Two Worlds II a bad game, though. There’s a lot of fun to be had exploring the world, and the main story includes a couple of genuine twists that make the final battle, and the ending that follows, more satisfying. The game’s magic system is impressively deep and card-based: cards can be combined within an amulet to create custom spell combinations, letting a mage-type character get quite creative with deadly combinations. Melee-focused players get similar depth, since every piece of clothing, weapon and accessory picked up can be dismantled into elemental parts — a shield, for example, might yield iron and wood — which then feed into the crafting system to upgrade other gear.

That system makes everything picked up along the way useful. Looting a group of defeated thugs might turn up five copies of the same sword, which can simply be dismantled for crafting materials later. How much upgrading is possible depends on a character’s progression: leveling up earns both attribute points (endurance, strength, accuracy or willpower) and skill points that can go toward assassin, crafting, mage, ranger, warrior and general skills, giving full control over how a character develops.

Alongside the single-player campaign is a separate multiplayer campaign with some key differences. It isn’t open-world; instead it’s broken into instances similar to an MMO, moving from one chapter to the next with up to seven other players. It’s more linear, but keeps the action flowing without requiring travel across the full map. Beyond the multiplayer campaign there’s also a deathmatch mode, a crystal-capture mode, a duel mode and a village mode, the last of which is a real-time-strategy hybrid where players build and run an entire village, keeping citizens happy and defended. It’s a mode with a lot of potential replay value, though unlocking it requires earning 10,000 auras (the in-game currency) first, which is a bit of an annoying gate on an otherwise appealing mode.

Ultimately, despite its technical shortcomings, Two Worlds II delivers a lot of enjoyment — enough to make returning to finish the next quest, or take another shot at a tough boss, genuinely appealing. The world is massive enough to keep completionists occupied for a long time, and between the single-player campaign, the multiplayer campaign and the additional multiplayer modes, there’s a considerable amount of replayability on offer. RPG fans looking past the technical pitfalls should find a really entertaining game — and a dramatic turnaround from the original that shouldn’t be judged by its predecessor’s reputation.

Rating: 7.5/10