The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a fantastic game, one that still stands as the high-water mark for next-generation RPGs. The only ‘problem’ many have with the game is a by-product of their love for it – they want to share their adventures in the sprawling gameworld with friends, but the lack of online options prohibits them from doing so. Some of those gamers hoped that SouthPeak Interactive’s Two Worlds would fill that desire to share an adventure, but unfortunately the game fails to pass muster in a litany of areas. In fact, the game’s biggest selling point is still completely broken a week after release. Ignore the back of the box, Two Worlds is no “Oblivion on steroids.”

The single-player experience in Two Worlds is passable. The main storyline is pretty uninspired fairy-tale fare, casting the player in the role of a nameless mercenary out to find his kidnapped sister who inadvertently gets caught up in a burgeoning war between humans and orcs. In addition to the main quest, players can also accept a myriad of different side-quests from NPCs they meet along the way. Unoriginal as it is, the narrative would have been bearable were it not for the unbelievably bad dialog that defiles every single character interaction. Half-assed attempts at Olde English fall flat at the best of times, and flat out don’t make sense most of the time. Amazingly, the voice acting is even worse than the dialog! Thankfully conversations don’t go on too long, as the main character isn’t capable of doing much more than asking a few simple questions, and the answers provided don’t open up any new or interesting dialog trees to explore. Since all of the characters inhabiting the world come off as lifeless automatons, the world itself feels dead.

At least it’s a fairly large world, and the game offers players a few options for getting around. The most obvious way is merely hoofing it on foot, but doing so leaves one vulnerable to frequent attacks. The more effective means of getting around the world is by using the various teleport points scattered around the world and are available for use at any time once you’ve unlocked the destination first. The final, but most aggravating way of travel is your horse. It doesn’t take long to unlock this cursed quadruped, but it takes even less time to discover just how useless it really is. At first, crossing vast open areas with the horse seems relatively innocuous, but combat is an entirely different story. When fighting on your mount, your damage is greatly increased and you take less damage, and this would be a valuable tool if the horse didn’t hamper your ability to fight every step of the way. The horse bucks and turns away from enemies (and even inanimate objects) out of fear, gets stuck on pieces of the terrain, and is almost impossible to stop in an orderly fashion.

Thankfully the combat fares better when you’re off the mount, or at least the mechanics do. The combat in the game isn't skill based like that in Oblivion. In fact, the combat engine feels more reminiscent of MMORPGs. You really don't have to aim your attack, time your strikes, block enemy attacks or any of that stuff. You simply hit the attack button, and if your enemy is within a distance in front of you, that enemy will take damage. Stat checks also come into play for damage and critical hits. Some gamers may feel like they are being taken out of the driver’s seat of the game, but there are other functions to focus on. You can activate special attacks such as abilities that will stun your opponent or kick sand in their eyes.





Over the course of the game you will be able to customize and purchase new skills, abilities, and magic spells for use in battle. The character-customization system also works well and lets players develop a character suited toward their play style. But that aside, the melee combat just looks ridiculously cool. When using a simple single handed sword your character will slash your foes with a very fluid attack motion, and when using two handed weapons your character will swing around his sword gathering momentum for a devastating final blow. Fireballs explode with tremendous power, and arrows knock opponents back with great force. All the attacks look very cool the first time you see them. The problem lies in the fact that there is only one attack animation. This may have you switching your weapon setup just so you can see a new attack for the next few fights, even if doing so is a pain since the inventory system is so clunky. It’s definitely not the best combat system around, but it functions well enough.

While the combat mechanics do their job, whoever was tasked with balancing the combat certainly didn’t do theirs. Enemies don’t level along with the player as they did in Oblivion, so players can find themselves both unchallenged and overmatched depending on where they go. The enemies are not only a challenge because of their levels, but because of how they position themselves. If you are fighting wild animals, they will just swarm trying to get a piece of the action. When fighting humans they will try to surround you while bow users will pluck arrows in your general direction. That would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that the strength of the enemies has no correlation to the area they’re encountered in, so there’s really no way to avoid enemies you don’t want to fight. Even traversing between the first several towns without wandering a foot of the beaten track isn’t a safe trip, as swarms of enemies will surround and dismantle the player with 2 or 3 hits. Dying delivers the player to the nearest resurrection shrine without any financial or experience penalty, but battles are rarely fun since the strategy typically comes down to getting off as many hits as possible before inevitably dying, respawning and returning to whittle down the enemies’ remaining health. A few hours later, you’ll be faced with enemies that can be slaughtered in seconds. The combat is almost never just challenging enough to be rewarding, it’s either too easy or too difficult.

All that being said, even the most uninspired, frustrating, repetitive games can offer a hint of fun if you can play with a friend. Unbelievably, despite being pushed as one of the game’s primary features, the online multiplayer is broken – even now, a week after the release of the game. When attempting to play with anymore then one friend, the game will have a tenancy to freeze the game with lag. Both the RPG and PVP mode suffers from this ridiculous amount of lag. Even with playing with only two players, the RPG mode suffers from both lag problems and frame rate issues. The game can occasionally slow down to half speed and characters will jump about the screen. To be honest, it’s just a horrible net-code, and it’s unplayable. More over, there are plainly obvious bugs throughout, including one where only one member of a party can complete quests in any given session. The other players can help, but when the reward finally comes the game doesn’t acknowledge any of the other players, and the quest is still marked as incomplete for the lot of them. The fact that Two Worlds managed to be released in this condition is a damning indictment of Microsoft’s certification process.





Various elements of the single-player component of Two Worlds range from decent to terrible, and the sum total experience is one that is remarkably mediocre and not much fun to play. Had the single-player experience been all that was advertised, the game would have walked away with an average score. However, Two Worlds is selling on the promise of a multiplayer component that is flat-out unplayable, and as such, the full package is well below average. Xbox 360 owners are better off playing Oblivion with a private chat channel open than attempting to play through Two Worlds.