Old-ish Video Games: Two Worlds

2007's Two Worlds is a strange, buggy, unbalanced mess held together with code and Polish profanity. And yet I find it oddly compelling.

Developed by Reality Pump (a Polish company established in the 90s and more recently famous for the glitchy, broken meme factory Raven's Cry), Two Worlds comes across as a copycat of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which released a year earlier.

The similarities are strong. Both are non-linear open-world high fantasy games with a main quest that's mostly optional. Both take place in a mostly temperate forest terrain with touches of the exotic on the fringes. Both have factions you can join. Both have a magic system that can be abused if you know what you're doing (those are the best magic systems).

Whereas Oblivion casts you as a firefighter stamping out hell-portals opening up all over the country because a doomsday cult wants to summon their god, Two Worlds starts with a more personal approach.

The hero's sister is kidnapped by a doomsday cult that want to resurrect a dead god. Totally different.

The major difference is that the nameless protagonist, is a complete idiot. His sister is kidnapped in the opening cutscene because he leaves her, wounded and bleeding next to a tree, so he can investigate the safety of an abandoned hut. When the conspirators approach him to blackmail him into working for them in order to rescue her, he takes it at face value. When he's able to contact his sister telepathically at various sites and learns of the quest to resurrect a dead god, he writes it off as hokey superstition, despite being able to be leveled up as a wizard. When it becomes obvious that collecting the artifacts the cult wants would be disastrous, he goes along anyway. One of the artifacts is actually powering the defense of an innocent city against orcish attack and when you kill the guardians and take it, the orcs invade the city and kill everyone in it before you exit the dungeon (you can apparently abuse the magic system and resurrect the cityfolk with a leveled up spell, but there's no story reason to do so).

Don't feel too attracted, that's supposed to be the player character's sister.

Blockhead protagonist aside, the combat controls are clunky, horse controls are clunkier, the map is not overly thought-out despite being rather large (there's only one river, the big one dividing up two major zones), and the English voice over acting is amazingly awkward. I went for a heavy fighter type of build and the penultimate boss was murdering me despite my high level, so I cheesed him with a low level cold spell that I beefed up thanks to the overpowered magic system. The ending glitched out on me and took me right back to the main menu without showing the cutscene, so I had to reload a save.

And yet.

And yet there's something to this video game equivalent of a B-Movie. The map is big. The environments are quite scenic, the soundtrack by Harold “the guy who wrote Axel F” Faltermeyer is kind of great, and while some of the zones are clearly undercooked (the swamp, the snowy area, the desert tucked away in one corner and so on) riding around and exploring remote corners is bound to turn up something interesting: A quest line, a dungeon to clear out without any attached quest, bandit camps, orc patrols, stone dragons that can be cheesed because you have a faster attack rate and can get them into a stagger loop as you pound on them without taking a hit. There are monsters that only exist in smaller areas. I was riding around on a skeleton horse. There was an entire city I never entered because it was locked. There were giant gates in the middle of the map I never figured out how to open.

In short, it has mysteries that reward exploration.

I wouldn't go so far as to recommend Two Worlds as a good game. There are many like it that do the same things it does with polish and balance, but I did have fun, which is the entire purpose of a video game.