🚀 go-pugleaf

Have just acquired the full European English version of Two Worlds II
and have been playing it for a few hours in its Single-player "Demo
mode" before doing any of the on-line authentication - just to make
sure that it appears to run just fine. Have tested it on Win 7-32 and
Win7-64.  The game has a 32-bit executable.

TWII uses a similar authentication scheme to that of TW I (3 installs
max.) but it is still unclear whether the installs are auto-revocable
on uninstall ( unlike TW 1).  I may find out more when I take the
authentication plunge.... If you don't like the TW1 authentication,
then you will surely not like this one either.... There are rumours of
a manual revoke tool "coming", but nothing yet on the TW2 website.

Besides the huge single-player campaign, this game has 5 different
multiplayer modes for which you will definitely require the unique
CD-key:-

Deathmatch
Duel
Adventure: "A 7-chapter multiplayer campaign in search of a magical
artifact." (Ed: Presumably with some selectively randomized placement
on replay?)
Village Mode: "A RTS hybrid where the multi-players can create,
maintain and protect an entire village."
Crystal Capture: "Teams compete to collect the most Azure crystals"

Anyway, back to the SP Demo mode. This long "demo" is actually a
seamless tutorial. Those who have played  Two Worlds 1 will find many
familiar game-play elements,  but presented in a very updated way.
3rd-person action-view, with totally-smooth mouse-driven camera
placement -- full-rotation horizontally and ~ +/- 80 degrees
vertically around the "player". Adequate scroll-wheel zoom, no
apparent first-person mode.

A truly-polished new game-engine called "GRACE". The Oblivion-style
character-appearance tweaks at the beginning of the game (far more
intuitive and detailed than Oblivion) are seemlessly -mapped on to the
in-game character and dynamically-activated - pony-tail swinging
naturally for instance.  

Terrific Intro -- for production quality almost on a par with that of
"the Witcher" -- and near-seemless cutscenes-to-action transitions
during SP game-play. Most of the cut-scenes were apparently generated
with the game-engine itself. Great mood-music. Solo instruments,
orchestra, chorus, organ.  Quality definitely reminiscent of Oblivion.

With all graphics-embellishments tuned to "worst-case" and PhysX
in-game HW-enabled, the game-engine ran at a consistent >90FPS indoor
and >70FPS outdoor on a GTX460 paired with a Q9550 quad-core.on a
1920x1080 display. Totally smooth indoor-outdoor transitions. The
recommended specs state "multicore processor" and Task Manager
indicated that during play all 4 cores in my CPU were active, with
Core1 being most active, but none were saturated. Dx9 in XP. Dx10 in
Vista and Win 7.

Card-based spell-crafting, almost infinitely-flexible and
exceptionally well thought-out, with the ability to pre-set string a
number of user-crafted spells together into fascinatingly-unique
chunks of graphical mayhem for the enemies.

And the story-line has started off in a great way. 

As for the English script and voice-actiing, Reality Pump has
certainly learned big-time from the horrible script and voicing of
TW1. The game defaults to added sub-titles for all the spoken lines.
However the English voice-acting is great and so clear that the
subtitles can be readily turned off.

The game un-abashedly borrows ideas from Oblivion with the syle of its
(much-longer) intro-tutorial fully woven into the story-line and its
cutting-edge (for 2010) graphics-engine,  the Witcher (not at all
surprising, since the TW developers are also Polish) and the previous
Two Worlds 1.

The (PC version of) the game has an interesting combo of embedded
auto-saves at important points and timed-autosaves at user-defined
intervals.....together with normal full PC-style save-anywhere slots.
Hurrah !!!

A footnote with respect to the Two Worlds 2 EU PC-release: You need to
patch it immediately to the "Gold" version (V1.1). The patch contains
many enhancements and quest fixes. It is a 77Meg download from
www.patches-scrolls.de. The imminent US release is expected to be the
"gold"  version. If so, you should see "V1.1" in the bottom right
corner of the Main Menu screen. (fyi: After the "Gold" patch there is
an Options entry "Check for updates" under the Main Menu  "Settings".
No further updates beyond "Gold" at present. That entry might have
been there before the "Gold"patch, but I applied the patch before
running the game....)

One cut-scene bug found in V1.1. There is a cut-scene after the first
meeting with an in-game character Cassara. At that point, the screen
goes blank (in both Win7-32 and Win7-64) and you need to exit from the
game via Task Manager. If you re-start from the previous auto-save
only a couple of minutes earlier, the cut-scene plays through
flawlessly and the game continues just fine... 

No spoilers and no comments on game-play. I will leave that to others.
Except that for me personally TW2 compared with TW1 is like comparing
bright daylight with twilight. The missed promises of Two Worlds 1 are
brightly fulfilled in Two Worlds 2. Methinks, I am going to have the
very best action-RPG fun since "the Witcher Enhanced". And the
game-engine is 'mechanically' and graphically far better than that of
"the Witcher" - only to be expected 2 years later.... Should make for
a very interesting comparison indeed when "the Witcher 2" is released.

BTW, for those inclined to use Gamepads, the XBox360 Controller for
Windows is fully supported. Otherwise, the controls are the usual WASD
etc. action-type mouse-keyboard combo.

Between the Germans (the Gothics and derivatives) and the Poles, do
the central Europeans now completely own all the graphical-goodness
and play-innovation in the action-RPG genre?  

John Lewis