Please note that pricing mentioned in the following is referring to digitally distributed versions. I wanted to share this at Ape as well for those that prefer hard collector's copies of their games. This review is in favor of the game itself and not preference to digital or disc versions as either format has its benefits.
I'm way behind in time when it comes to playing new games. Much of the stuff that I'm currently working through was released years ago but this has been very much to my benefit because these games in question, once Broken upon release, have now all been patched and enhanced to perfection.
Four hours spent in Two Worlds proves to be an experience that was well worth the wait. I think this needs to be on the net in certain places because the title deserves more credit than it recieved initially.
As of right now, the Epic Edition, which can be purchased from gog.com for $10, runs tremendously brilliant, with all eye candy turned up to full blast, on my AMD 2.0 GHZ 2400+ with 1 gig of RAM. I should state though that despite my ancient specs I do have a Radeon HD 3650 512 MB Plugged into my mother board.
Two Worlds plays very similar to the Gothic series and what Ultima Ascension was originally meant to be. It's an open-ended RPG in a massive 3D world and a mature, PC, take on Ocarina of Time.
TW has the visual quality of Gothic 3 but the performance prowess of the better constructed Gothic 2.
I could turn this into a phone book describing my play time so far but it is better just to let you read the reviews already in existence, read through the manual which can be accessed for free in PDF form via Steam and touch on complaints from ancient reviews.
First and fore most – the horses in the game react EXACTLY as you would expect horses to react. The AI is such that horses have a mind of their own and will not allow you to take them down too steep of slopes and will also start to turn away and head off in undesirable directions if you are steering them towards viscious animals.
Early in the game you do not want to use these horses for any sort of mounted battle until much later when you've upgraded your control over them through the horse riding skill.
Secondly, the game boasts a sense of humor that some might not get but I find it to be rather hiliarious a lot of times. If Two Worlds were a movie, it would be a comedy. The voice and comments of the protagonist sound very much like the voice and comments of Duke Nukem and there is an ongoing joke whenever storm clouds roll over and it starts to piss down rain in the game world. Other such instances like this may take the ‘seriousness’ out of the story line but they definitely do manage to get a chuckle.
There are hitches, hiccups, stutters and freezes during gameplay but they are nowhere near as excessively dominant as they are in Gothic 3 and instances when they take place do make sense as either many actions are taking place at one time, many opponents are on the screen at one time or the game is loading you into the new portion of world that you're starting to enter. And even though these instances are far from constant and nowhere frequent enough to spoil enjoyment, you can do away with them nearly completely by turning all the eye candy down to a medium level.
Finally most bugs and flaws were found in the XBox 360 version. So if a night's rental on the 360 turned you off, I'd suggest trying it on the PC which corrects a lot of those issues.
This is the short of it, an amendment to reviews to an amended game. If you've avoided it previously, it is well worth checking out the PC version now that it has been all patched and sells for $10 complete with expansions.