Two Worlds - hands-on

Later on in the game you’ll have a respectable mastery of swords and/or sorcery, but to begin with special moves seem spawned from common sense and desperation. Kicking dust up, for example, or thrusting your torch towards an opponent’s face. Fans of Oblivion’s horses will be pleased to know you can fight while mounted too, though don’t expect to hit quite so much. Much effort is going towards making the horse handle and act like an animal, and in our playtest that amounted to a lot of struggles for control that were mostly embarrassing and occasionally, if occurring during a daring escape, fatal.

The playtest also reassured us about a couple of less down-to-earth features. When you die in Two Worlds you’re brought straight back to life at the closest Resurrection Shrine, with no penalty and all of your gear. While this strips away the gravity of combat a little, it’s a small price to pay to be able to forget about saving your game.