Two Worlds II Hands-On - Melee Combat and Updates at E3

We take an updated look at this role-playing sequel and try out some melee combat for ourselves.

The 2010 Electronic Entertainment Expo continues with more coverage of more games, like Reality Pump's Two Worlds II, the role-playing sequel that picks up after the events of the original game. While we've previously covered some of the game's basic details, this time around we took an updated look at some of the new features and tried out melee combat for ourselves.

Who's Making It: European studio Reality Pump, the creator of the original Two Worlds, as well as the Earth 2100 real-time strategy series.

What It Looks Like: Two Worlds II is a third-person role-playing game with real-time melee combat, so you could say that conceptually, it resembles The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, though the art style is completely different, and the color palette is a lot darker and more subdued.

What You Do: As the hero of Two Worlds II, you must thwart a tyrant bent on dominating the world and committing heinous acts of genocide. Of course, in order to become strong enough to succeed, you'll need to take on various quests and fight lots of monsters to earn experience levels that will net your character "parameter points," which you can use to increase your ability scores, and "skill points," which you can spend in the game's classless profession system of six different skill trees: sorcery, melee combat, archery, rogue skills, trade skills, and general skills.

Aside from having an open-ended character development system, Two Worlds II has many hidden combinatorial strategies to explore. The trade skill system not only lets you combine items to fashion new weapons, armor, and garments, but also lets you break down existing items and extract the core materials for use with other items, along with inserting magical items into various item slots to strengthen whichever weapon or armor you're working on. The same can be said of the magic system, which is keyed off of about a dozen playing cards attuned to a certain type of magic, such as elemental fire or kinetic force, and can be augmented with enchanted lockets that can combine up to three different spell cards at once to create all sorts of different, hidden combinatorial effects.

How It Plays: We were able to play only the console versions of the game. Two Worlds II controls much like a conventional third-person action game that uses the left thumbstick to move and the right thumbstick to adjust your camera. The right trigger is used to attack, and the left trigger is used to block while standing still (or to sprint while moving). The top three face buttons deliver different types of attacks depending on whether your character is currently blocking, and you can also press in the right thumbstick either to access your consumable items (like health potions) or, if you have a wizard's staff equipped, to access whichever magic spells you have queued up.

The melee combat plays much like a standard hack-and-slash game and requires you to briefly line up with your target (the game has an actual reticule to help you target) and then unleash whichever attacks you like, occasionally setting up for a dramatic kill, which you can trigger by pressing the A button on the Xbox 360 controller (or the X button on the PlayStation 3 controller) to start an especially gruesome cinematic sequence that shows your character dismembering his foe.

In addition to the single-player adventure, Two Worlds II will have numerous multiplayer modes for up to eight players at once, including head-to-head free-for-all deathmatch, team deathmatch, cooperative questing (which will offer about nine different missions on nine different, completely new maps), and an economy-based "village" mode that lets you and your buddies create your own villages to produce tradable goods.

What They Say: Reality Pump and Southpeak are working together to iron out all the problems from the first game while offering a solid RPG experience and interesting multiplayer.

What We Say: The game already shows improvement over the problematic original Two Worlds. The village multiplayer mode sounds especially interesting. In any case, Two Worlds II will ship this fall for the PC, the Xbox 360, and the PS3.

93 Comments

  • Fartman7998

    Posted Jan 7, 2011 4:03 pm GMT

    Hmm.. Maybe the PC guys should get a console if they ports are sucky. Just saying.

    I'm still not excited about this one, but it sounds interesting. The multiplayer sounds run-of-the-mill but it might be good, how knows

  • Tristen95gi

    Posted Dec 22, 2010 1:48 pm GMT

    grakinfrak you dont have very good skills do you

  • gfxarts

    Posted Dec 10, 2010 8:20 pm GMT

    @ grakinfrak- you want a proper "turn-based RPG"? I like my game to include a little bit of skill. That's where the real gratification comes from. I don't play games to watch choose your own adventure animated movies. I apologize if you have a disability or something. I'm just saying that there is nothing "hybrid" about an RPG that includes stick skills.

  • grakinfrak posted Dec 7, 2010 1:09 pm GMT (does not meet display criteria. sign in to show)

    grakinfrak

    Posted Dec 7, 2010 1:09 pm GMT (hide)

    I am pretty tired of these hybrid RPGs, whether they are action RPGs or strategy RPGs. I wish someone would make a proper turn-based RPG, so you can play a character that uses their own reflexes and battle skills instead of yours.

  • k_oldsoul

    Posted Dec 2, 2010 1:28 pm GMT

    --- HOPE THIS HELP---
    from the graphic side it is a lot better than Two Worlds I,there is alot more to do,story got alot more interesting though u need to play Two Worlds I to fully understand what happened,magic & combat is fun.upgrading equipment is more interesting.there is nice tutorial.Assassination is possible.nice little games like lockpick & dice.making potion didn't change but is important to survive. there is some horrible sound effects,characters looks better but need more work on them,little tough in the start,u still have to fight your way.game engine need more development,u need to run alot since your horse is GOD knows where.

    I hope they focus more on Sound effects ,improve the way the character walks & fight,write more scripts for game quests so we don't run on problem in finishing them in their next release.

    ****I got 1 Terrabite video games****

  • ulkas

    Posted Nov 21, 2010 4:21 am GMT

    I enjoyed Two Worlds. Compared to Obvlivion it's not as forgiving in the beginning, so you are in for a real challenge, and it's in a way even more open-ended. It's also more mature than Oblivion was. On the negative side, the beastiary is all over the place, and dungeons are quite uninspired and small, and it gets very easy (for the most part) at the end.

    In any case I look forward to playing TW2, as there's not much to choose from in terms of single-player fantasy RPGs. Witcher 2 would also be interesting.

  • sirexium

    Posted Nov 21, 2010 3:52 am GMT

    I've started playing this game 2 weeks ago and it's certainly is one of the best rpg I've played.

  • cristigyk

    Posted Nov 12, 2010 4:54 am GMT

    i hope this one will actually have a story. i played the first one for two days and got bored. a good story and believable characters don't even need technical prowess so why is it so hard to find a good RPG?

  • rug_attraction

    Posted Nov 11, 2010 3:45 am GMT

    @MrToastman
    It's a preview, not a review - so far, they only had the chance to have a brief look at the game. Expect a thorough review to follow around the time when the game is launched.

  • philljen

    Posted Oct 28, 2010 12:37 am GMT

    Did'nt like Two Worlds, but will give Two Worlds 2 a chance...

  • greygaurdianx posted Oct 20, 2010 12:36 pm GMT (does not meet display criteria. sign in to show)

    greygaurdianx

    Posted Oct 20, 2010 12:36 pm GMT (hide)

    The last thing I am going to say, cutscenes and voice acting are everything.

  • greygaurdianx posted Oct 20, 2010 12:30 pm GMT (does not meet display criteria. sign in to show)

    greygaurdianx

    Posted Oct 20, 2010 12:30 pm GMT (hide)

    I just want to say three things. Screw co-op. People need to stop wishing for RPG's to go back to the way they were. PC is dumb.

  • DarkGothiN

    Posted Sep 30, 2010 8:58 pm GMT

    I just hope for, co-op all the way, other than that it looks good, and I think it's a good thing to put the game on hold till January, to buff out anything that mite suck on it and hope to put co-op so you can run with a friend.

  • MrToastman

    Posted Sep 25, 2010 8:42 pm GMT

    I don't think this is a particularly thoughtful preview. Give me a real opinion. I don't like flushing money down the toilet by investing in poop games that got wishy-washy reviews. "Part of the game seems interesting. Oh and some stuff from the prequel got fixed. Whatever."

    I guess I just won't buy it. Not without evidence of goodness! Good thing Castlevania comes out on the same day :]

  • Humorguy_basic

    Posted Sep 12, 2010 5:17 pm GMT

    @tyrosxps - well said every first/third person RPG nowadays is compared to Oblivion and every isometric RPG is compared to Diablo, however different the games are from their forebearers! This is just another sign of the dumbing down of our media and gamers, that a game has to be 'Diablo-like' because nobody knows what isometric means any more, and people compare two Worlds to Oblivion because Oblivion - on console - is he only RPG they played! To the extent someone has played the terrible console conversion of Two Worlds, can they please point out it was on console. Because the PC version was much better than the console version and many people seem to think the PC version as bad as the console version because so many posters don't say they are talking about the console version!.

  • tyrosxps

    Posted Sep 2, 2010 11:32 pm GMT

    stop comparing Two Worlds to Oblivion, it's a totally different game. Oblivion sucked as RPG anyway. It was a nice looking console biased action game, nothing more. Morrowind was the best in the Elder Scrolls series. And Two Worlds 2 looks good to me, let's wait and see how it turns out

  • EasyToTalkToIty

    Posted Aug 31, 2010 6:39 am GMT

    Two Worlds II, Two Worlds 2, Two Worlds to, Worlds to too, Two Worlds totoo.

    TWO2 AS BAD AS TWO.

  • Pelm

    Posted Aug 24, 2010 6:18 pm GMT

    i dont know how i feel about this one, the first game didnt do so well. I hope that this one does better then before.

  • TheGreyArea

    Posted Aug 5, 2010 6:30 am GMT

    Quite simply, I am drawn to the co-op elements promised in this title. I'll look forward to hearing more about it, and if possible, a demo

  • chechak7

    Posted Aug 1, 2010 1:23 pm GMT

    it's seems great as first series and even better its reminds me of elder scroll oblivion