This game has some of the worst voice acting I’ve ever heard in a game. Normally when reviewing something, even I usually start with graphics, right? After all, even before you touch the keyboard or controls, you’re seeing the game. However, this isn’t really a review. It’s thoughts on the game
So, yeah. This game has some very, very lamentably-poor voice acting in it. I wish the unnamed main character… I wish he were a silent protagonist, but sadly he is not.
Take a ten-year-old, and ask them to read from any given Superman strip. Note down what they emphasise. Then, notes in hand, turn your attention to the script of the game. Give the notes to the very disinterested voice actor given the main role. The worst thing about the main character is that his voice sounds like
it’d be pretty good for the role. The actor just didn’t bother to
deliver the lines properly, though..
Unfortunately, not only does the main character talk in cutscenes, he also chatters whenever you find an item you can take in the wilderness, too. Whenever you pick a herb or mushroom. Whenever you rip the heart out of a wolf’s rapidly-cooling chest. Whenever you extract a rabbit’s bladder.
Happily, NPCs aren’t usually as bad. Gandohar sounds the most human of the lot. Every other voice runs from ‘mediocre’ to ‘painfully uninterested’.
Alchemy. Taking ingredients from the corpses littering the ground around you is slightly more satisfying than it ever was in Oblivion. Otherwise it’s more confusing and less useful, though I haven’t yet found a trainer to give me the first point in the skill.
Most of the ingredients you… uh… ‘find’, have heavy negative effects attached; such as damaging you for drinking potions made with them. Fair enough; that’s what happens when you eat a poisonous mushroom. I didn’t know wolf meat (… okay, wolf heart) was just as poisonous. It’s also, thus far at my meagre 0 points of skill, impossible to predict the effects of a potion. Odious concoctions that taste like a stab in the gut? Okay, I can make those. Useful things that take advantage of ‘permanent effect’ ingredients I find around the place?
…no, can’t have me making those.
Graphically, the game is… well, it’s pretty good in some areas;
environments are lovely, not quite to Oblivion’s level but just a bit
better than World of Warcraft. Weather effects are stunning; fog
actually looks like fog, rather than a simple whitewash that
doesn’t impede your vision at all. Fog is potentially deadly, for what
it does to your range of vision. Which is a good thing, honestly.
Character models, on the other hand, are… well, they’re where it all
falls apart. Past the intro sequence, I don’t think I’ve seen a NPC
open their mouth to speak; instead, they just… nod their head, and
somehow their voice emanates through teeth and closed lips. The main character, though his mouth actually opens to emit that dull voice, is worse. Entirely independent of the voice, he jerks and gestures like a Muppet. Or a Sesame Street puppet.
Story-wise, the game seems to drop you in the deep end. Our unnamed protagonist is seeking his sister, kidnapped or otherwise-just-vanished a couple fo months previously, and has travelled to Thalmont since receiving a letter suggesting he could find his sister there.
A letter sent by the kidnappers. More of a ransom demand, in retrospect, though they seem to want community service more than gold.
Done well, this would be… um… passable.
Unfortunately, it’s not done well. As mentioned, the game seems to drop you in the deep end. In medias res. As a literary technique, that can be a wonderful thing. Only one book ever handled this poorly enough that I had to check*. In games, however, all it’s ever done is make me feel like there’s a prequel out there I never played. Unlike most stories beginning in medias res, games seldom drop entirely into flashback-mode, where the past becomes the present of the narrative. Instead, if we’re lucky – for a given value of ‘lucky’ – we get exposition, instead. We’re just told.
If we’re unlucky, that vague feeling that there was a prequel we never played never goes away. Writing this, I just checked GameFAQs to make sure I hadn’t skipped something accidentally; this is the ‘Epic Edition’ of Two Worlds I’m playing, and the name of the expansion integrated into the game is the same as the main quest, so… but it doesn’t seem I missed anything after all, hm.
Also, the game seems undecided over whether to take the route of having an identity-less protagonist, or giving him a personality. On the one hand, we get no name for the guy; identity can form without a name, but it’s much more difficult to refer to a nameless person. ‘Him’. ‘He’.
The trouble is, though Two Worlds lets you customise the main character
a little, he has his own personality, and therefore is not yours.
There’s no attachment gained from making his arms slightly longer and
giving him blonde hair. So they can’t have intended an identity-less protagonist, where in ‘The Elder Scrolls’ style, the character’s personality is defined wholly by the actions of the player.
But it’s all so… so stock, generic personality. He has an identity, but he has such a prosthetic, fake, shallow personality that it doesn’t impact on me at all, beyond ‘you call that a personality? That’s NOT a personality!’
But I’m only a little way in. I might get proven wrong later. His only interactions have been with two non-significant NPCs, Gandohar, and another mysterious cloaked guy whose name didn’t stick.
Controls are… eh. The game is just about similar enough to Oblivion that I keep hitting the wrong key for spells. Turning is unresponsive, too. Mostly just don’t have anything to say on this.
Lastly, difficulty. I’m playing medium because I just don’t like starting on easy; that’s essentially admitting the game’s medium difficulty mode defeated me before I even start playing. But enemies take a long time to kill, and if I ever run into more than one enemy at a time, it’s usually a straight run for the first Health/Mana restoration shrine so I can be more or less invincible whilst I whittle them down, or else the nearest town and NPC who’ll kill stuff for me.
I suspect this is screwing me in some way, though. I don’t know whether enemies in this game respawn yet, and you gain skills by levelling and then spending points, rather than training skills to gain levels. Could be troublesome later on.
Okay, I’ve compared this game to Oblivion enough for today. I really need to get around to installing that and digging up all the mods my last save used.
* ‘Mirror Dreams’, by the way. Constant references by the main character to events that would have also made a brilliant book contributed to this. Otherwise great, both it and ‘Mirror Wakes’, the sequel.