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Writing a review for Two Worlds II has been a task of frustration.  It is a game that I know I should not like as much as I do, and yet I constantly want to play it.  It is a game that is glitchy and chaotic, and yet I wanted to see what will happen next.  It is a game that has recorded dialog that makes the Jay-son joke seem like thespian acting, and yet I get a chuckle with each spoken line.  I have gone through at least twenty drafts trying to convey my feelings about Two Worlds II, but at the end of the day, it always comes down to the same thing – sure it is rough as they come, but damn if it isn’t entertaining.

In the beginning of Two Worlds II, we find our hero from the first game is not having the best of years.  It seems that Gandohar, the malevolent enemy that he did battle with in the first game, has taken over the world and rules it with an iron fist.  Gandohar has also imprisoned our hero and the hero’s sister.  It seems that the sister has a demonic power trapped inside of her, and Gandohar is using it to rule over his domain.  So for five years after the first title, our hero has been rotting in a dungeon, until one fateful day, his former enemies, the orcs come to free him from his cell and set him on a path to take down Gandohar.  Sure, it seems cliché, but it serves its purpose, which is to provide a framework of a story that takes place in a huge open world.

The size of the world really caught me by surprise in Two Worlds II.  Sure, I knew it was in the vein of the Elder Scrolls series, but I was not prepared for the sheer scope in size.  When you zoom out of the map to full view, you end up seeing several small continents that form the world of Antaloor in Two Worlds II.  I had put in about 25 hours and was just getting off of the main continent that I started on in the game.

Of course, world size is nothing if there is a lack of anything in it, and Two Worlds II starts to take a turn towards the weird here.  See, my understanding of Two Worlds was the fact that it was a medieval RPG title, so how did we get transported to the Serengeti plains.  I travelled out of the first town I was in, only to find myself face to face with Ostriches, Wild Boar and Rhinoceroses.  Somehow, I don’t remember those animals coming up on my radar when it comes to this genre and general time frame.  Giant ants, spiders and the like I get, but Ostriches are a whole different thing.

Weirder still are the quests that you receive during you time in Two Worlds II.  At every turn, you find someone that wants to task you with finding something, or someone, or at worst, fetch a bunch of items.  Sure, they are all similar to other RPG titles, but it is when you get into the side quests that Two Worlds II charm starts to shine through.  It is like the developers kind of got bored with the serious tone of the main story and decided to have fun with the side missions.  I mean, who can’t get a chuckle out of a side mission where you are asked to escort a woman to pray at her dead husband’s grave, only to find the husband is not so dead, and the wife has been feeding innocent travelers to said not so dead husband.  The response of your character is priceless and it is quests like keep you coming back for more of them. 

While Two Worlds II is something that you can play and have fun with, it is by no means a well-polished game.  The spoken dialog is absolutely horrendous at times, having a feel of rank amateurs putting in voice work for the characters.  The main character that you play seems to be channeling Christian Bale’s Batman at every moment, which ends up being unintentionally hilarious.  Character animations never feel quite right, with running being the most obvious example.  At times, running looks familiar, and at other times, it looks as if a snail could outrun you.  It is uneven in its approach, with animations either being over exaggerated or understated.  Worse still is the idea of multiple mappings to buttons.  If I am running, I have to come to a complete stop before I can use the A button to say, mount a horse, or interact with an item.  This really hurts during combat when you want to get away from a fight by mounting your horse, but you have to come to a complete stop, make sure you are at a specific angle and then press A to mount the horse.  Or course at this point, you have most likely been killed.

It should also be noted that if you want the interface to look correct on your TV screen, you will have to go into the options to change the interface to safe screen mode.  For the first hour, I played without this wrong, and I missed all the tutorials on how to do things, because the front half of the descriptions, including the controls for actions, were cut off the screen.  At first, I thought it might be my television, but it happened with three different Xbox 360’s on three different model televisions.  This clearly seems to come from the idea that the interface was created on a PC, but ported to the same position on the consoles.  Reality Pump should have either had this turned on by default, or made adjustments during the design phase, because you end up missing out on critical information on how to do stuff like cast spells or pick locks.  I spent an hour breaking ever lock pick I found because I had no clue as to how to do the minigame for picking locks.

Another mess is the difficulty level of the enemies you will face.  There will be hours on end where you will walk through lines of enemies, and then encounter a foe that is head and shoulders above where you are at skill wise, and there is no reason as to why such a high level character is at this point in the game.  At one point, I died at least a dozen times at the hand of a woman in a tower, only to beat her by running away, and she did not turn fast enough and fell off the tower to her doom.  It drew a chuckle, but I should not have to resort to strange quirks and combat strategy because a high level character is placed in such a low level place.  And always save whenever possible, using multiple save points.  The autosave will do things like save in the middle of a battle, leaving you in a hopeless situation.  I even had it save once right before a final deathblow, leaving me to backtrack over a half hour of progress.

With all of this, it sounds like I should hate Two Worlds II, but I continued to want to play it, even though the bugs and the design irregularities.  It was like a guilty pleasure similar to watching soap operas on a day off from work.  I should hate it for all the weird bugs, and unbalanced gameplay.  But the story goes in such strange places and takes such weird turns that you are compelled to see what other crazy shenanigans the developers have up their sleeve.  I mean, how many RPG titles have you go back to the college where the main bad guy went to school to find out what made him evil, leaving you with quests like getting a girl to dance at a frat party, or getting to the bottom of a sexual harassment scandal.  It is romance novel levels of fiction, and I ate it up completely.

Two Worlds II is a strange, unintentionally humorous game that never seems to take itself seriously at any point.  Everyone seems to be in on the joke, and if the player is as well, you will find a fun, enjoyable experience full of quests and story plots that will completely engage you.  It will eat up time and you will tell yourself at the end of each playing session that you will never play the game again, only to start up another session at your earliest convenience.  If you are looking for a serious RPG experience akin to Morrowind or Oblivion, look elsewhere, but if you want something that will make you laugh, scream in anger, and suck up huge amounts of time with enjoyment, Two Worlds II is totally for you.  Two Worlds II gets 4 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

Check out Two Worlds II and other Xbox 360  reviews at Test Freaks