There is something utterly incoherent about everything in this game. Enemies are not a challenge so much as needlessly meaty. Magic is not novel so much as it is confusing. Playing Two Worlds II just feels like somebody decided to throw up every trope about every role-playing game ever made while trying to fit that cogently into a single experience. Unsurprisingly, the game feels much like your throat does after such an event–dry, sore, and kind of uncomfortable because something might also come out later. In that regard, Two Worlds II doesn’t disappoint. It delivers on churning it back up.
What is sorely disappointing about the game is how utterly beautiful the entire experience is. Just walking down the beach would be a great experience if there weren’t always ogres or bobcats or some other random creature that goes around attacking random passers-by (or just you). But that incongruous experience is kind of what also makes Two Worlds II work. Every now and then, questions popped up about whether they were serious or just passively insane, and by the end of the game it could only really be confirmed that the latter is the truth.
Given the general affinity for role-playing games today to decide that what no-stops means is no interesting ideas, only rehashes less interesting than the last, Two Worlds II shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. There’s something so average about the entire thing that it’s just hard to reckon. How does a game get so much development in relation to having the best water effects imaginable, yet have no redeeming play at all? Even things unrelated to gameplay are awful. The only reason to play this game is to explore it in a sort of Afrika meets Predator-like fashion.
But nobody really wanted such a mash-up. Some people want to be able to explore an interesting space, others want to hunt random stuff and kill it because they can. But the two interests are mutually exclusive. There might even be an argument that they’re genre exclusive, and the genre of the role-playing game continues to degrade with each new poorly wrought mash-up. Yet in some ways, it’s difficult to not suspect that that may be the reason the role-playing game is lauded, because of its inability to be placed quite so comfortably as other videogame genres.
There is probably a reason that so many games opt for what is a difficult genre to enter today, simply because of its ambiguous space. Calling a game a role-playing game gives the player space to acceptably be someone else, whereas other genres create a certain discomfort. Even so, Two Worlds II is a game that is just uncomfortable, largely due to its inability to be even slightly ambiguous.
Recommended: No