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Two Worlds

Pop-In and Stutter: The New Hotness

When placed side-by-side with its contemporaries, Two Worlds disappoints in the visuals department. Most apparent is the engine's LOD hack, which creates jarring pop-in at even the highest draw distance settings. Enemies, trees, building and even the landscape will suddenly appear, ruining any semblance of immersion. Trees in particular are handled in an odd manner: first, they pop onto the screen, and in the middle-distance they sit as 2D sprites, until they are in the immediate field of view, where they reveal their 3D glory in one startling moment.

The highest HDR setting may cause blindness

HDR is so overdone that you may opt to turn it off entirely

You won’t find any 20-mile views from Antaloor’s mountain peaks, because the distant landscape is always covered in a thick haze (or just blurry, with the unnecessary Depth of Field option turned on). Vegetation sprites - tall grass, tree branches and leaves - sway in the breeze, but the flora lacks the realism of Oblivion's SpeedTree-generated vegetation (licensed from IDV). The rendering code is pushed to its limits at all times, and every conceivable hack is used to cram a large, open world into an inadequate graphics engine.

Clipping issues are common: remember when David Copperfield walked through the Great Wall of China? This Grom is reenacting that moment with a tree trunk, postmortem

A texture seam, another common visual anomoly

An inadequate lighting model produces only the most rudimentary of shadows, and at even a moderate distance shadows are transformed to cursory spot shadows before disappearing altogether. In combat, blood frequently splashes through the air, but its cell-shaded, cartoonish appearance doesn’t fit in the game world. Character models are often under-detailed and draped in the most basic skin textures, and all models suffer from jerky animations. Clipping issues abound, with all manner of solid objects - from corpses to weapons - possessing the capability to disappear into the ground or into other models. Finally, textures mainly come from the school of design known as "blurry". There are some examples of above-average texture work to be found here and there, but a lack of detail shaders and a proliferation of visible seams only serve to highlight the general lack of quality and variety that blankets the world.

The Depth of Field option blurs the landscape in the distance. The effect works well in cutscenes, but not when playing

With Depth of Field turned off, distant landscapes retain a sharp look

A shot with the highest quality settings, including 16xAF and 2xFSAA. The higher the visual settings, the more dated the textures and models look

The same scene, with quality settings set to medium (as played on the YouGamers' minimum hardware). At this setting, world detail is lacking, and textures are often a blurry mess

Breaking the Bank for Mediocre Visuals

Given the issues the engine has pushing pixels even on top-end hardware, it’s not surprising that the minimum requirements are too low. Two Worlds isn't worth playing at anything but the highest detail settings, as anything lower turns the already-fuzzy world into pea soup. While you can get away with less, you'll want at least 256MB of video memory riding on something like an  ATI Radeon X1800 or an  NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT. With a decent CPU (an  AMD Athlon 64 3400+ or  Intel Pentium 4 540) and 1 GB of system memory, a comfortable 30+ FPS can be achieved at resolutions up to 1280x1024.

Another high quality shot. The simple lighting model produces very rough shadows, and architecture has only basic details

Another shot taken on YouGamers' minimum hardware. Texture detail is all but gone, and the lack of AA is readily apparent

For higher resolutions, move to at least a dual-core CPU (an  AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or  Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 should do the trick), along with 2 GB of RAM. Either processor, when mated with a  512MB ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT or  640MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS, will keep the frame rate playable at resolutions up to 1920x1200, with 2xAA to boot. Be warned, though: even with a tricked-out Intel quad-core clocked at 3.6GHz and an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX handling GPU duties, Two Worlds will still stammer like a schoolboy on his first date. Frame rate inconsistency is far worse than a low average frame rate, and the game proves that when the FPS counter grinds to the teens at the most inopportune times.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Story and GameplayPage 3: CombatPage 4: Environment and PresentationPage 5: Graphics and HardwarePage 6: Summary and Scores

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