#PS3 TWO WORLDS II REVIEW SERIES#

Like the single-player game, there are no set character classes you just spend your skill-points where you want.

#PS3 TWO WORLDS II REVIEW SERIES#

It's like a second campaign, in which you start a new character and fight your way through a series of linear maps to earn XP and gain levels. Two Worlds II also features a number of multiplayer modes, the most expansive of which is the Adventure mode. before picking over the parrot carcasses for eggs and feathers. I walked in and was confronted with a scene of comical avian carnage.

The quest concluded at a songbird exhibition. At one stage, in the beautiful, Feudal Japan-themed city of New Ashos, I found myself assisting an umbrella-vendor whose latest inventory had been cursed by a jealous shopkeeper, and was now flapping around her customers' houses munching on them. It's bulging with off-piste quests, and many of them are agreeably potty. In both content and geographical terms, Two Worlds II is enormous if you're after an absorbing time-sink of an RPG, here it is. It simply forms a backdrop for the game's myriad smaller tales. The narrative arc isn't the pay-off, though. It's difficult to get as excited about the game's storyline, which follows on from Two Worlds, and once again sees the hero's sexy sister (yeah, that always was a bit weird) in thrall to the evil Gandohar and in need of rescue.

One early NPC actually mentioned a rain of anvils, which I haven't seen – but, given how outlandish and versatile the system is, I firmly believe it's in there. Why not add an area poison-burst to it? And an icy damage-over-time effect? The combinations are mind-boggling. You can then stack more of these combos together within the spell, depending on your mastery of specific magic schools. Combine a Fire spell-card with a Missile carrier-card and an Increased Damage modifier-card, and you have you a tasty, direct-damage fire-bolt. To create a castable spell, it needs to be combined with carrier and modifier cards in the spell-crafting interface. The spells themselves appear as cards, and can be bought or looted just like any other item. While you need to pour skill-points into specific schools of magic – Fire, Necromancy, Air, for example – to improve your abilities, mastery of the schools doesn't actually unlock spells. Spell-crafting is the most intriguing of Two Worlds II's crafting systems. But this new system, which turns the useless into the useful, is a considerable improvement. When I learned that Two Worlds II did away with the first game's item-stacking mechanic, I was dismayed it was one of the things that kept me playing. Through the metallurgy skill, these can be used to improve the stats of your favourite weapons and armour so they grow with you. A bag bursting with looted weapons doesn't necessarily mean a trip back to town to offload at the vendor, as any weapon or item of apparel can be broken down on the fly to its base components. You find yourself running at breakneck speed through the countryside, snatching indigenous herbs without pause and emptying foes' pockets, post-massacre, with Dyson-like efficiency.Ī similarly elegant system applies to weapon-modding. Looting can be done from a distance, and a single click sucks everything into your backpack. The entire process is affably simple, too. It's almost a meta-commentary on recycling.īasic alchemy is available pretty early on, and lets you combine reagents into healing, mana, and stat-buff or resistance potions. In fact, absolutely everything is worth looting, as the game's superb crafting systems enable you to repurpose every piece of trash in your backpack to useful ends. But even the gizzards of a lowly hyena are worth collecting in Two Worlds II. Loot a slain animal and, with a squelchy audio cue, you'll fish out one of its meaty gasbags and flop it into your backpack. The sequel goes one better: it's got a lot of lung. As fantasy action-RPGs go, 2007's Two Worlds may have been a bit shonky, but it certainly had a lot of heart.

Ps3 two worlds ii review