Two Worlds

I've played a fair number of RPGs in my time. Some have left me awe-struck. Most have been forgettable, but not innately awful. Some have been just bad. None, however, have ever reached down this far. I mention for context that I had never previously played a SouthPeak game, nor had I heard anything specific about Two Worlds. While browsing through Amazon.com one day, I saw what I thought to be a hidden gem; how often can you buy an RPG, new, for $7!? Despite the 2 star review, it has to be worth $7! 
Like many of the games I ultimately purchase, this game had a substantial shelf life before I decided that its time had come. I popped the game into my 360 over my vacation, finally determined to experience Two Worlds. I was immediately unimpressed, however. This, too, I disregarded because after all, how many games captivate us from the outset? Give it time, I told myself. Unfortunately, it went downhill from there, and quick. In hindsight, the $7 price tag was one of very few good features of this game. 
Below, I will outline this game by various categories and features. WARNING: this review will read horribly due to the terribleness of this game. You read at your own risk here and your desire to game may well be sucked from your very soul by the end. Please enjoy. 
Graphics/Visuals: I wanted to start off with something that most everyone notices right off the bat with video games. We are in a day and age where graphics are everything. We often find that we can forgive bad plots and clunky game mechanics if the game is aesthetically pleasing. This game had serious issues with this aspect that never alleviated themselves. I'll start with the most obvious, and that is the character models. Every character model is the same. All males are built the same way, as are all females. The only difference is the shape of their clothes/armor. The characters have big, bulky bodies with tiny heads perched atop. this looks especially ridiculous when you first approach a hooded figure, such as a mage/necromancer as you do in the first couple of side quests you stumble upon. The next visual bug has to do with the weather patterns in this game. I'm sure when the developers added this feature, they thought themselves clever and ahead of the curve. However, the rainy animation falls flat and is immensely unimpressive. Worse still is when the fog rolls in. Yes, fog, what a novel concept. With these weatherization features, this game aims at a realistic outdoor atmosphere. Unfortunately, the fog is such that it debilitates you from doing pretty much anything. The fog is so thick that you can barely see two or three steps in front of you. I draw to the old scooby doo cartoons where someone (usually Daphne) makes the comment that the fog is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. At which point, Scooby, being the rascal he is, uses his claw to cut a perfect circle through the fog and proceeds to munch on it. However, not even the strongest swords Two Worlds has to offer could cut through this fog. This becomes especially frustrating when you are unfortunate enough to get pulled into combat in this fog. It becomes nearly impossible to see the enemies to attack them, impossible to determine when they are about to swing at you (preventing you from dodging) and God forbid you run into an archer and have to hunt him down through the fog! The outside environment looks very two-dimensional and last-gen. Given the vast size and openness of the map, it would be irrational to expect perfection, however, it is a sad reality that a game like WoW, with many times the land mass and which runs at just under 20 FPS on my computer, looks better than this game. Aside from these major deficiencies, the game suffers from an extreme case of texture-pop-ins. Even more pathetic is when the textures DON'T pop-in! At one point, I came though a teleport only to emerge on the other side as, not a man, but a little white square. I was "square-man" for a few minutes before my character model decided to reappear. 
Map/Travel: This seemed to go hand-in-hand with the analysis of the visuals of Two Worlds. One of the few pros to Two Worlds is the vast and open map. Nearly all terrains are open to adventure (whether there is anything to be done there or not). However, the lackingness of other significant elements in this game managed to cheapen even this. I found myself in awe of the massive areas to be discovered, but quickly found that there was no real rhyme or reason to my travels. I get that this game was supposed to be non-linear, but it appeared to be a little TOO non-linear. For example, in WoW, as you quest in one town, the last few quests in that area will usually guide you to another area in which to quest, in a nearly seemless fashion. Two Worlds, however, leaves the gamer to rack his brain wondering, "where the hell do I go next?" Another huge quip about this game is the mode of travel. With a horsed warrior on the cover, the developers at SouthPeak clearly intended for players to get a real kick out of riding around on horseback, adventuring. The glamour of horse riding stops at the cover, however. My first adventure on a horse was beyond awful. Maybe I was spoiled with the seemless and smooth flow of horseback riding from Red Dead Redemption, but whatever the case, it was far from fun to be mounted in Two Worlds. The horse controlled like a Sherman Tank, often turning the opposite way that I needed it to, it was completely unresponsive to the joysticks and seemed to enjoy walking for more than galloping; or even trotting. I found that it was far more convenient for me to just foot it and use the teleporters I was able to activate throughout the game. Teleporters, another novel concept. And they are a God-send in this game. One of the pities concerning these devices is stumbled upon early on in the game, when you obtain personal teleporters that can be used anywhere. It sounds great, and maybe it was just me, but I never found an occasion to set on of these bad boys up. This was not really a negative, per se, but seemed like a waste of potential. Aside from these major impediments to traveling, a few minor annoyances also plagued the game. I'll sum this on up rather quickly: I dare you to try and run up a hill; go ahead...I'll wait...See, told ya. Swimming was a nice feature to add in this game, but even if you did take the time to level it up, you found that you still swam much too slow for it to be of any convenience, and if you wanted to wear any GOOD armor at all, you quickly found that it would cause you to sink like the Titanic in fast-forward.  
Tactics/Gameplay: This is probably one of the things that aggravated me the most. This game sought to strike a careful balance between turn-based combat, and hack and slash games. How did they do this, you ask? Simple: your character can simply go up and start hacking away on any enemy, and it will eventually die. Dodge the enemies attacks if you can, but if you don't, it's an instant kill in most cases. Even at the end of the game (right before you fight the final boss) the demon you fight is highly susceptible to damage, but a single swipe from him and you find yourself respawning across the map. And what penalty do you suffer for dying? The mere inconvenience of respawning is the only associated cost. The creatures that killed you don't even regenerate health upon your death. Therefore, it is entirely possible to blow through the main story (if that's what you choose to call it) w/o ever leveling up your character. Just keep hacking your way through until the enemy falls; it's not like there's any TRUE penalty for dying! This not only took the fun and tactics out of the game, but also made side questing useless. Why bother, ya know? 
The Main Character: And that's his name too, by the way. Your character is so cool as to shun the silliness that is an actual name. You are just, "that Mercenary." And that's not all; you're also a prick. This is the most unlikable character I have ever played. Some people didn't care for Kratos from the GoW series because he was an evil, sadistic monster. I'd gladly have had that kind attitude as opposed to "that Mercenary's" attitude. Unlike most RPGs, there is no Karma/Reputation gauge. There are no choices in the dialogue. You don't get to choose whether you want to be witty, serious, helpful, mean, or greedy; the game decides for you. Your character is insufferably self-centered and greedy. When taking a quest, the first thing he does is make perfectly clear that he will be paid upon completion; and paid a lot. This kind of protagonists is the worst kind to play. I don't get a sense of identity with this character. He's such a prick that I found, quite honestly, I didn't care what misfortunes fell upon him; he probably deserves it. This is culminated in every exchange you have with others in the world. It's all about you and your gold. Not their plight; not their misfortune; not the happenings in the environment around you. Who pays you the most? That's what's truly important. The next thing to despise about your character (and all others) is the voice acting. For those of you who have seen Troll 2, you know bad acting. However, I can safely say that Two Worlds has topped that mark for it's voice acting. Your character's forced 'grizzled' voice sounds so bad that it's laughable; no really, you will laugh. His enunciations are misplaced and he places emphasis on all the wrong words, when he uses emphasis at all. Most of the time it sounds as though the developers typed the script in for Microsoft Sam to read back. To add variance to the voices, some of the voice actors sound as though they are speaking their lines through an empty aluminum can.  And if the voice acting is terrible, the writing itself has to be worse. I swear to God, I don't know who talks like these characters do. What protagonists, in their right mind, drops likes such as "I would very much like to have a stone such as this." My least favorite is when my character would make unprompted comments about the weather, which were always cheesy and exemplified the bad voice acting. "Ah, rain again." 
Story line: I guess it's time to torture you with this one. The first problem I have with this story line is how utterly short it is. There are only around 6 actual quests in which there is any true action. There are around 15 total story quests, but most of these simply involve going and getting partial information from shady, under-developed characters. The quests which actually require you to go somewhere and do something can be done in a cheap fashion, whereby you simply run past all the enemies, grab your objective and run back out. The side quests in this game add nothing to the main story and are completely irrelevant. It all culminates in the end when you are betrayed the group you were forced to work for, but as it turns out, the person you thought was their leader was not (oh no). Their true leader was the one you thought may have been your friend (double gasp). Not that any of these characters are developed enough for you to care. The main boss is a pushover by comparison to other bosses in other games. He's no more difficult than an enemy you would find in your common junk mob throughout the game. The hardest enemy in the endgame quest is the one you fight right before tackling the main bad guy. This enemy transforms himself into a giant demon who can insta-kill you with one punch, but is highly susceptible to damage (lame). Right before the final fight, the game breaks from its linearity and allows you a choice. Based upon what you do, you get a good ending or a bad ending. Only the good ending earns you the nearly-400 point achievement for beating the game, yet the bad ending choice is the default. I couldn't help but to look ahead and see what the developers did in the sequel as far as the story is concerned. From what I've read, this ending is completely irrelevant anyway. Despite the fact that you stand victorious, after having hack/slashed that evil S.O.B. into oblivion, you still, somehow, start the second game as his prisoner, having been locked up for 5 years? The most heartbreaking part about this whole lack of a story is that it is not void of potential. Here you are, a mercenary (Badass occupation) in the midst of an all out war between humans North of the River Gon and the Orcs South of Gon, with some ultimate bad guy pulling strings behind the scenes, attempting to throw the world into utter chaos. When framed like this, the story almost draws parallels to the LoTR series. However, this game cannot even begin to capture that kind of magic because it is so poorly written and under developed. This game was flush with a lot of varying story elements that weren't fully developed and ultimately had no bearing on your main quest. This did nothing but cause a flurry of unrelated, marginally important events to float around you, in hopes that you would sort it all out and make some sort of sense out of it; good luck. I beat this game in just over 20 hours, which is incredibly short by RPG standards, and it's not because I sprinted through the main story line without doing sidequests. I had reached level 50 and done nearly all of the sidequests in every major city by the time I finished. I did not complete all of them though. Some quests, if completed in certain ways, would forever exclude you from finishing other, unrelated quests. NPCs would be involved in multiple unrelated quests, and solving one in fashion A would make that NPC disappear from existence, thus making it impossible to complete the other UNRELATED side quest. The last time this happened to me, in the capital city of Cathalon, I became so enraged that I went through and just slaughtered the entire city (it's not as though there were any negative ramifications to such acts. I had completed 95% of all the quests here, had good armor and weapons, and took no penalty for being a mass murderer). In my rage, I decided that there were too many bodies for me to waste my time with the garbage loot they were bound to have. When you lose your desire to loot in an RPG, it's time to sprint to the finish.   
Combat: This game's combat system was outline a little bit in the above section, but lucky for you, my dear reader, there is enough terribleness to merit its own section. Aside from being hack and slash, there is no block button in this game, only the dodge button. The dodge button becomes useless when facing a mob that has you surrounded, as you will soon find yourself dodging away from one insta-killing swipe and directly into another. Your character is knocked off his feet way to easily, but even then he is still able to be damaged. Therefore, it was quite frequently that I found myself on the ground in a circle of hostile enemies, all bludgeoning me before I could even rise to my feet. There is no variety in the combat, both you and the enemies have 2-3 different attack animations. You cannot do magic unless you are standing stock-still throughout the entire spell (try this when surrounded by 10 scorpions or 15 insect creatures). If you should happen to run across an archer, pull up your inventory and grab your best running shoes. This was the most annoying aspect of combat for me. Archers would always run away from you in attempt to put enough distance between you and them so as to make their bows effective in combat. This is retarded because you end up chasing a lone archer halfway across the map (unless you manage to trap him against a wall or something). If you attempt to just leave him and let him run away, he chases after you at a distance adequate to shower you with low damaging arrows. The poison ability on this game doesn't seem to actually do damage, rather it takes part of the health bar of the poisoned character, and turns it green. This green part will SLOWLY drain. However, if you manage to take out all of your opponents red health bar and leave him with only green (indicating, again, poison) it takes three times the effort to get rid of this green part of his health bar; poisoning your opponent essentially gives them an armor boost against your attacks. The whole combat system was glitchy, broken, overly simplified, and unimpressive.
Other: This will consist of a litany of other issues that didn't snugly fit in the above categories. First of which is the way this game begins. You get no tutorial and the story is so vague that you have no idea who you are, how you got where you are, where you are, what you are to be doing, or how to do it. I was immediately killed by 3 wolves and 2 boar upon walking out to the main road because I had been given no tutorial on combat, nor the importance of dodging. One of my first side quests required me to go into the midst of an Orc controlled city (where I was repeatedly raped). This game literally just throws you in and expects you to fly by seat of your pants. There are several skills which your character can learn and level up during the game, yet they are poorly explained and all but useless. Yea, it would be cool to switch from beserker to defensive fighter, but how the hell do I shift my passive abilities to active/inactive? The magic in this game was okay, but I found it to be ineffective overall. I rarely used it, and when I did it wasn't as though it had a great effect on my enemies, despite the fact that it was leveled up along with all of my other stats. The alchemy system was also a feature that missed the mark. There was a vast multitude of herbs and like items that could be picked up in the open environment, which could then be cooked up into cool potions, augmentation stones for weapons, or bombs (which I never did figure out how to use, nor did I see any reason to learn). However, with such a wide variance in the materials, the sheer number of possibilities was frustrating. This was especially true after the 100th time I made a poison that drained 30000 health from my character, but did increase his strength by 2 for 5 seconds...While this collection system was not in and of itself terrible, it certainly is out-modded, especially after the last Dragon Age game, where instead of cluttering up your inventory with tons of crafting items you'll never use, you merely discover the location of crafting materials and order the completed products (BRILLIANT). The game has severe problems with locking up, and although most of the time it is only momentary, you will on occasion be hard locked and forced to shut down your console. This glitchy-ness does render the game unplayable after so long. After having been frozen in place after every few steps, you'll shut off your system and walk away for days on end. The way you walk through (literally) the environments as though you were a phantom really grinds on your nerves.
The only truly redeeming aspect of this game was the system for powering up weapons and armor. There is a wide variety of both in this game (it borderlines on TOO many, but as it is, it's awesome). Many of these items, such as swords, for example, are exactly the same. So, say that you, much like I, found 15 Katanas that were all the same weapon. You could combine all 15 Katanas into a single, super-powerful, class 15 Katana. You could further the awesomeness of your blade by adding an elemental augmentation stone to it. But wait, there's more! Call in the next 15 minutes, and you can add and UNLIMITED amount of augment stones. That's right, I ended up adding well over 75 lightning damage stones to the weapon I ended the game with (a class 21 Katana Gomai) which gave it over 2000 lightning damage in addition to its normal striking damage (2200-2500). The same was true of the armor (as far as stacking similar items, not augmenting). I was able to combine similar armors to increase the stats on what I was wearing. It was difficult at first because, with so many different sets of armor, I was constantly replacing what I was wearing, and thus, never matched, but eventually I was able to level up a particular set until it was strong enough to not need replaced (and it finally matched for God's sake). This was an immensely fun aspect to the game and one of the only ones that was not tainted by the terribleness of the overall game.  
In conclusion, this game was not fun. It was not what you wanted it to be, nor what you may have expected it to be. For me, I had not real expectations, save one: Don't let me feel as though i wasted $7...and it failed. Much in the same way that Final Fantasy X (Easily the best RPG of the last generation, and, arguably, one of the best RPGs of all time) inspired me to play every half way decent RPG ever made, this game (Without a doubt the worst RPG I've ever play, and, arguably, the worst of the current generation) has left me with the feeling that things may never be the same for me and this genre. I will forever approach RPGs (even those that review well) with caution. What if those turn out to be as bad as this one! Or worse, what if they're worse!!? I cannot imagine why a sequel was produced for this game, or why people actually bought it. I ended this game with a level 50 character, 33/41 achievements, and 800 gamerscore. I gave it a thorough play through and I regret it. I don't feel as though I will ever be able to give SouthPeak games a chance to make it up to me (unless it comes by way of a $7 check in the mail). If RPGs are your thing, you may be able to suffer through this game like I did. But if not, I strongly advise you to shy away because it certainly has the potential to suck the gamer right out of you. This is a text book example of unused potential.