Two Broken Two Play - Two Worlds II Impressions
By RelentlessKnight 2 Comments
I'm not really a fan of the first Two Worlds, the dialogue and acting as well as some merits of the gameplay and controls are the things that put me off that game. And the fact that I'm astounded of how people liked that game even though it's entirely broken. Recently Two Worlds II (repetition) was released and I want to try it to see if they had improved the problems of the previous games.
So I brought this game in hopes that it would be better but what I got is kinda the same minus a few major problems from the first game. As I booted this game up, I was met with a lame main menu along with your character that you'll be playing. Unfortunately at first I thought you can customize your character whether it could be gender or so but it's just that ugly character will long hair and you can only change his colour, face/complexion and height from the legs to the torso and that's it. After you submit your changes, it didn't really load into a cutscene but transition quickly to some kind of throne room that you see in the main menu.
Apparently, you and her sister? is chained to two thrones by some sort of sinister and menacing dude, Gandohar and then out of a sudden, your sister starts talking demonic and some kind of magic comes out of you to your sister. It then flashes to two guards throwing you off a set of stairs and going to put you in jail but an assassin and Orc archer ambushed the two guards to rescue you. And then starts the tutorial level or so.
Taken control over the character, the interface and HUD looks unique; health and mana is in the bottom right corner of the screen which the mana bar/orb is in the centre of the health bar, the bottom center part of your screen is where you could find the objective, map screen as well as health/mana potions and there's a distance meter on how far your objective is on the bottom left. The inventory screen at first was quite confusing and it felt too big having your items and a frustrating time if you try to sort your inventory out,
The controls are kinda hard to get used to, use parts sprint is replaced with crouch and other parts is the action/attack button and it's annoying that they match those actions of the left and right bumper rather than the other buttons on the 360 that could make the controls like frustrating. Especially when it's third-person.
The looting is also weird and the fact that two of the guards you looted earlier, you cannot equip them which is bullshit because shouldn't all items earlier to ranging the level you are right now, nevertheless later on it might be useful. The camera was quite nauseous to me, it felt too loose and disorienting especially when you interact with characters. Which leads me to the next point, the interaction is like Fable II but more annoying, it zooms in to the NPC that you're speaking and you can only move slowly in a limited area either spinning around like a maniac or humping them. And it makes these encounters awkward and lame making games like Fallout 3 laugh at them for trying to immerse your character into this world.
Like I said, the interaction with NPCs is quite annoying but what really annoys me the most is the dialogue and acting, I mean seriously, have they even improved since the first Two Worlds? The acting either sounds like them reading off their lines or a robot especially the Orc warrior that you meet, he sounds like he's trying to take a dump something and sounds nothing like Orcs, and that goes to all three of the Orcs and the assassin. The dialogue is also atrocious, it's not like those terrible translations from the early 2000s but it sounds like English isn't their first language for the people who wrote this game and it's quite bland and boring.
The cutscenes that apparently are skippable, are awkward and terrible as well especially when that Orc Warrior is fighting some Metal-Clad Knight - it felt some goofy and ridiculous and that also goes for all of the cutscenes I saw. As well as the scene where the Orc Shaman/Mage is trying to rebuild to bridge and then out of nowhere you and the mage is teleported to some kind of area filled with skeletons and the tutorial of how to use your staff. Also when you and the assassin get teleported to the island and she quickly gets struck on a bear trap, being a stupid moron that she is. And the fact that the walking animation looks weird as well as the jumping.
When I finally able to fight, it's just a button-mash trying to hack and smash your opponent until he/it dies but when you're attacking them, sometimes i see enemies kinda clip into the environment making it annoying at some instances. Fighting with a baton, you first get was easy but when you and the orc rescue party teleports to some island, you get to assassinate and stab fools and the back and it's fun while it lasted. Also when you get your first bow, it was quite a learning curve to learn how to shoot and use one arrow to kill two of the enemies I'm facing. But the most annoying learning curve that I have to figure out without much instructions of the tutorials is casting spells and also picking up cards to make new spells. The amulet feature to make spells is just frustrating and obnoxious, it took me a while of what the fuck I'm doing and finally figured out that I could improve my spells' power and found the card for water attacks to get rid of a giant fire-resistant beast. Having no instructions at all and forcing to read a book is tedious and it's 2011 idiots, put some kind of tutorial without being frustrating that it is.
Now, I'm at the Orcish camp after reaching the prophet, Cassara and receiving a leather armor set afterwards. The assassin also brought me underground to a room with a stash to store my items as well as introduced me to Orc Blacksmith who gave me a quest to get five steels from items that you collected from the enemies you faced to get materials. I gave him five steels pieces and he became a vendor to sell my trash to and also gave me another quest to find some orish material. This feature is similar to WoW, specifically like the Enchanting/Blacksmithing, you can destroy your weapon/armor for materials like steel, wood or iron and use that to upgrade/craft your weapons/armor into better gear.
Anyways that the moment where I stopped and probably will never play again because like I said, the acting, interface and dialogue is dragging me down and I cannot remember much of the storyline because it doesn't take itself seriously. At first, I thought it would be more like Oblivion but it isn't and that game is better than this pile of horseshit. It got so much potential as a better game before but apparently, the idiots at SouthPeak and TopWare Interactive thought that they didn't want to improve the sequel and made it like the first one kinda like what Lionhead did with Fable III.