Preview by: Troy Goodfellow

With every game getting a sequel these days, I shouldn't be surprised to be sitting in a tiny room watching Topware producers run me through Two Worlds 2. Yes, the original is largely forgotten and one colleague did reply to my schedule entry with "Really?" and a chuckle. But Topware promises an open world RPG with better graphics, a better crafting system and a more subtle plot.

Two Worlds 2's plot is a direct sequel of the original one. The bad guys have won and rule the world with a not quite iron fist. The developers are trying to move away from the idea that role playing evil is just killing people for the sake of it – every character will have motivations that make sense if only from a warped moral perspective. Your hero (only a male is available in the solo campaign) opens the game a prisoner of the big bad, and is freed from his cell by a party of orcs. If you remember the original Two Worlds or any other RPG ever made then you know that the orcs were not the good guys. They have their reasons, of course.

Even if the plot is not improved, the writing certainly is. The first game was plagued by Ye Olde Renaissance Fair Middle English as rendered by Poles, with a heavy helping of "mayhaps" and "my lieges". The dialog is now more natural, moving towards a more cinematic approach to the text and story. Console gamers will appreciate that this is not a late port of a PC game again. The developers are aware of both the limitations and opportunities presented by medium, so it will be a true multi-platform launch.

The setting has a diversity that was conspicuously lacking in the original game. It was, I suppose, called "Two Worlds" and not "Many Worlds" but the similarity of many of the towns meant that you never had the experience of real discovery that you can get in the best open world games.

Two Worlds 2, however, has upped the ante with maps and cities, giving you an African Savannah area (where we saw our hero wander to close to an ostrich flock and so got chased into a reload situation) as well as Japanese and Middle Eastern themed cities to counter the typical medieval Europe palettes. Is it plausible that all these things will be on the same small continent? Does it really matter? The variety shakes things up visually and lets developer Reality Pump show off its dynamic lighting system in a bunch of different areas.