You have to ask yourself why, in the name of all that is holy, did Reality Pump decide that the best way forward was to make an open-world Oblivion-style RPG? Because it’s abundantly clear that, someone, somewhere, has made a gross underestimation of the resources involved in pulling off such a feat.

Opening with a cut-scene in which your sister is kidnapped by the 857 AD Dark Helmet lookalike contest winner, the plot then jumps inexplicably two years forward, where you’ll find yourself inside some kind of stone structure. Kill a couple of Groms (goblin-like creatures) and it’s here that the cracks begin to show, and the sheer hilarity at how awful everything is starts to pour ceaselessly in.

Even moving about in an environment that consists of little more than four walls and a floor is too taxing for the engine to pump out anything approaching an acceptable frame rate. Just wait until you get outside, though; it stutters, jumps, jogs, stops altogether, and you can’t run more than 100 yards without a pause for loading. If there was an excuse for it, such as the visual fidelity being so high that it pops your eyes out with poison bolts, before firing them back into your skull with a belt-fed crossbow, then we’d find this bitter pill a little easier to swallow. But the fact is, the graphics are terrible – the character models are simplistic, nothing in the game looks good close up, and the trees, rocks, plants and animals consistently pop into view when they’re mere feet away. In all honesty, we’ve seen better-looking games running on lastgeneration gear.

Combat is so dull and lifeless it’s little more than an irritating chore. Mash the right trigger… and that’s it. Your character has a total of one move at his disposal (apart from the insanely naff magic found on the other trigger) and although you get a different animation for each weapon, the game is designed so that you’ll only want to keep upgrading the one you have. It’s likely one move is all you’ll ever see. Plus, if you’re fighting on any kind of incline, the combat just doesn’t work at all – your chosen weapon goes straight through your enemies as if they aren’t even there.

If you’re a die-hard fan of this genre, you’re probably thinking, ‘Yeah, but I bet the quests are still quite fun’ – think again. The quest structure, which obviously involves heavy use of your map and quest log, is fundamentally unusable. Your mini-map, which should point towards your selected quest objective, simply doesn’t. It clutters itself with every point of vague interest within 500 light years. Cue main map screen for clarification – uh-oh, that’s broken too. It just doesn’t make it clear where you should be going without awkward zooming and an unreasonable amount of time spent pawing over inconsistent quest-log information.

Although there’s a staple RPG framework applied to the menus, such as the ability to upgrade weapons and armour, make potions, assign abilities to hot-keys and manage your magic, they’re uniformly unintuitive to use. What’s more, the treasure dropped by your enemies is lamentably unbalanced. It’s quite possible to play for hours, facing off against difficult enemies that drop nothing more than a twig and the odd coin, only to discover a random wandering Grom who drops two epic swords, three weapon upgrades and as much gold as you could eat. Bonkers! There’s also a certain amount of character customisation to be had in assigning points to various abilities when levelling up. However, the game makes you put these into utterly pointless skills such as swimming (without doing so, you’ll swim at a metre a year), rather than where you’d really like to – namely, those that assist you in twatting things.

But we’ve saved the best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) ’til last. The dialogue in this game is criminally bad. Reality Pump obviously thinks that using Olde English words, such as ‘forsooth’, ‘verily’, ‘prithee’ (yes, ‘prithee’) and ‘mayhap’, cleverly adds to the Olde Worlde flavour. The script is so poorly written, though, that you have to wonder whether or not there’s a writer out there, snickering like Muttley at the ‘mayhap whimsical’ joke he’s played on the Polish developer.

The final nail in the dialogue coffin is the voice acting. With every monotonously read line, every character in this game sports the kind of vocal chords that commonly overdub actionmovie trailers – deep, husky, American and insanely funny when applied to the Shakespearian lexicon.

There’s frankly nothing that we can recommend about Two Worlds, other than that its innate badness is kneeslappingly farcical for the first hour. When the mirth starts to fade, though, all that you’re left with is a game that’s a sad, withered husk of what it should have been.

Dan Howdle