I remember how this game was marketed back in the day in Germany. Several gaming outlets hyped Two Worlds up as this new savior of western RPGs, playing in the same league as Gothic and Oblivion. Well, they tricked me into buying this game on day one and I'll never forgive them for that :D Honestly, even though I was still pretty young at the time this game released and my standards for video games in general were really low (I loved playing shitty ad games from Kelloggs and other companies^^), I was really disappointed with this one.

I thought that the game's graphics were alright for the time it released and the music was fine too. There was actually one feature I really liked. Whenever you picked up a weapon of the same type as the one you were already holding, you could stack those weapons and combine them. That way, your weapon would get a random upgrade which was neat. No more cluttering your inventory with useless items. I don't know if Two Worlds invented this system (I doubt it honestly) but in any case, credit where credit is due, I guess.

Apart from that, the game was a mess. It was buggy as hell, crashing every half hour or so, the performance was atrocious and the overall level of polish was just non-existent. Besides these technical problems, the writing of Two Worlds was just plain awful. Again, I was a teenager at the time with no clue what "good writing" entailed but this was so terrible, I couldn't overlook it. Plot, dialogue, everything written in this game was just a pain. The most generic fantasy slop you can imagine. I remember that the German localization actually had some pretty decent voice actors which in hindsight feels like an absolute waste of talent.

I have a weakness for janky early 2000s games but this is just the worst kind of jank. It's not worth digging through the mud as there simply is no gem waiting at the end of your efforts. Do yourself a favor and play something else.

I kept hearing that this was some sort of secret Elder Scrolls-killer, a cult classic, “Oblivion on steroids” it even says on the back of the box. And I gotta say in all honesty: No it is not.

The graphics and animations look worse than a lot of PS2 games. Seriously, some of this shit looks like it belongs in GTA 3. Yet despite that it runs at a framerate of about 20 most of the time and still constantly freezes and stutters, rendering the game almost unplayable. Combat sucks. Attacking is incredibly imprecise, the attack animations are floaty and stilted, you look like a kid playing with a toy lightsaber, and whatever you’re using, swords, spears, clubs, your attacks have dismal range, which is especially infuriating when you’re trying to chase down something that keeps running away from you like an archer. When either you or your enemies get hit, you jitter awkwardly in place and there’s a low res blood effect that looks like it’s from an early version of After Effects, and bafflingly, the sound when you hit enemies, again with anything, swords, clubs, whatever, is a stock cartoon punch sound effect, like something out of a Nostalgia Critic video, as if it was a placeholder sound that they just forgot to replace before the final release. There’s also a backstep with stupid long i-frames that’s easy to abuse and isn’t even animated, just has you rubber band backward. The enemy AI can also be really stupid, and they’ll sometimes just sit there throwing attacks while you’re out of range. Under normal circumstances, I found most enemies were fodder, I found myself getting screwed over by the janky mechanics a lot of the time, but when things lined up (aka, I abuse the backstep), regular enemies could be dispatched by the dozens with ease. But then it’ll hit you with these really abrupt difficulty spikes and suddenly throw you up against enemies far higher a level than you that can kill you in two or even just one hit. The game also theoretically has an open ended main quest structure, but the level and reputation requirements for each area roughly constrict you to doing them in a certain order unless you plan on grinding insubordinately. There are debuffs too, which I think are supposed to immobilize you, based on the animation, but you’re still able to move through them so it’s you sliding around in the animation of you standing there, covering your eyes or something. Quest design is basic at best and repetitive at worst. Most quests are just you talking to a guy, then he sends you to talk to another guy, who sends you to another, then another, then another, and it just keeps repeating ad lapidum, until it culminates in you being sent to fetch or kill something. The whole experience is also buggy as hell. Animation glitches, audio glitches, several moments had me or my horse getting stuck on nothing and having to reload a save.

To top it all off, the writing is awful. On the surface the story is basic, find the mcguffins, save your oddly sexualized sister. In practice, it mostly just boils down to exposition, you being told things that you’re almost never explicitly shown. And it feels like every character is drunk, as characters make some of the dumbest, most baffling and counter intuitive decisions I’ve seen in a game like this. The dialogue isn’t much better. It sounds like they wanted to make it old timey, but couldn’t be bothered to do the research, so they just threw words like “pray” and “verily” into sentences at random. The delivery makes it worse, this voice acting is some of the most horrendous I’ve ever heard, I have to mention a particular npc in the Japanese part of the map, who cycles between like three different accents in the same conversation. Then again, you’re probably not even going to hear all of it though, because the volume is hugely inconsistent, I had frequent cases of the music drowning out the characters voices.

This game is a complete disaster. But I hate to end on a completely negative note, so if there’s one positive I can think of off the top of my head, I found it amusing that bandits had a pocket sand attack.

"Oblivion on steroids" is what the back of the case says but if definitely isnt LMAO

some of the best lines in gaming tho

you jump in water - "ah wet"
you fight goblins - "ah looks like my in-laws" que in sitcom laugh track
and death yells this guy makes when you die is sooo funny lol

cant say its the worst game ever but it sure is funny lol