The system also encourages experimentation because though it’s pretty easy to guess that the fire card and projectile card will produce your traditional Hadoken, obscure mixes can still provide unusual but effective results. Offering players a card system to mix and match components of a spell allows them to simply create unique attacks that fit their play style. Though they’re all equally deep, spell creation is the only one of the three trades that’s ever any fun. The game provides the player with everything they need to complete the game and apart from a few Excel fanboys, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to sift through tables of components to brew the perfect mana potion if they don’t have to. The problem with the weapon crafting, spell creation and potion mixing elements of the game is that despite the solidness of their design they lack any real point. There is the option to deconstruct items to craft or repair weapons and armor, which is one of the game’s highlights but it doesn’t excuse the poor management system. This makes the virtual backpack constantly cluttered, but leaves the player unwanting to throw anything away because they could sell it for gold. Two Worlds II subscribes to the everything-is-collectable doctrine of item management, filling the player’s pockets with hundreds of useless but marginally valuable items. It wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t constantly require the player to flip through their inventory screens. It could have been made a lot easier to manage with drop-down menus or simply consistent controls but as it is, things are frustrating at worst and confusing at best. The menu system is just as bad, requiring the player to constantly check the ever-changing button legend on their screen. It would have been great except it’s never clear how you execute each of these elements as the buttons always shift, and triggers just don’t feel right for sword swings. An easy to understand system of blocking, counter-attacks and specials earned through leveling offered decent variety to the combat that wasn’t expected. Unfortunately the poor button configuration completely ruins combat, which looked like it had potential. This sort of design breaks any sense of immersion, throwing any work developing an immersive world out the window. It’s all very confusing and constantly requires the player to think about what button they need to press in order to do what they want. Unsheathing a weapon is a separate button from attacking, which is incredibly frustrating and doubly so if you want to switch weapons (another button) in the middle of combat.Įverything is context-sensitive to which equipment set you’re wearing and what weapon you have out. In fact there are a lot of unnecessary steps in Two Worlds II’s control scheme. What’s worst of all is trying to use magic, which requires players to hold down a trigger to prepare spells while using face buttons to cast, adding an extra and completely unnecessary step to throwing a fireball. From swordplay to horseback riding to general mobility, the triggers are the centerpiece for this poorly laid out abomination of a control scheme. The designers seem to have a torrid love affair with the controller’s trigger buttons because for some idiotic reason they seem to control everything important within the game. All of this would be fine of course if it weren’t for the god awful controls that make it nearly impossible to efficiently do anything.

Two worlds xbox 360