It’s time to start a new PC game, but I’m a bit sick of shooters for now, so it’s time to get to one of the handful of RPGs I still haven’t started yet. The candidates are: Oblivion, Two Worlds, The Witcher, NWN2, and Gothic 2 or 3. The Witcher is supposed to be the best of the bunch, but yesterday I started with Two Worlds first instead. The word-of-mouth is that it’s a rather average game, so it’ll probably be less disappointing than if I were to play it after a really good one.

The first impressions are that the graphics are fairly decent. The terrain is perhaps slightly less pretty than Oblivion, but the people’s faces are much better (though they were supposedly much worse before the patch I applied). The map looks decently large given how little I’ve uncovered so far, and there are teleporters for getting around quickly.

Combat is a bit simplistic in that you just click the left mouse button to swing your weapon and the right mouse button to fire your active spell. You’re usually attacked by a group of enemies though, so the real trick to combat is in positioning yourself so that your swings hit multiple targets, avoiding putting yourself in a spot where multiple enemies can hit you, and withdrawing effectively in order to heal or regain mana.

You get a horse early on from a side quest in the starting village, but the horse controls are notoriously awkward in this game. It’s not so bad when you’re just riding from place to place, but it becomes really difficult if you try to take advantage of the horse to do some mounted combat, since you waste most of your time just trying to get the horse turned around and going the right speed so you can take a swing. You’re best off just dismounting whenever you want to fight, which is fairly often.

I did a couple side quests for the starting village, running off some bandits and activating a teleporter a ways away, but most of the starting quests require you to travel to a village fairly far away for some reason (and you can’t teleport until you reach the teleporters on foot and activate them first), so I haven’t done those yet. I also did the first few quests in the main story, putting me back in ‘telepathic’ contact with my kidnapped sister. The plot isn’t all that exciting so far, though. An ancient evil, someone trying to awaken it, an important artifact in my family, blah blah blah…

The first handful of levels came fairly quickly, giving me a lot of stat and skill points to spend. I wasn’t sure what the magic system was like though, so I’ve been going mostly for warrior-oriented passive skills, so that I’m stronger in straight-up combat without having to use any special skills. I’m using a bit of magic as support (healing, really), but I probably won’t dabble in the other skills until I get a bit more experience.

There’s also an alchemy system and I’ve been finding components for it all over the place, but I don’t have the skill yet so I can’t do anything with them. It’s not a starting skill, so I have to find someone who will train me in it before I can even put any points in it, so it’ll have to wait for now.

Overall, it’s not really that bad a game so far, or at least not nearly as bad as some of the forums might have you believe. It’s no Oblivion and it has its flaws (the aforementioned horse controls, some horrible voice acting and silly Elizabethan dialogue, mainly), but it’s still kinda fun. I’m playing the PC version though, and the 360 version has a different control scheme that a lot of people dislike, and some performance problems that I don’t see on my fairly-new system.