I finished the game about a week ago. These are my general RPG preferences so you get a sense of where you stand regarding my tastes and view of Two Worlds 2 (excluding really oldies): Loved Dragon Age, Risen, Gothic 1, liked Gothic 2, disliked Gothic 4, hated Oblivion.
So, regarding Two Worlds 2:
+ Diverse environments. Not a single western Europe forest, but forests, savannas, jungles, swamps, rockies etc.
+ No monster leveling. There are areas early game that you must avoid or you'll get one-shot killed, and when you over level-up you can return to these same areas and destroy every moving thing. They won't have gained power just to spite you.
+Beautiful graphics, excluding animation and most characters. Nice textures and lighting.
+ Imaginative and beautiful magic system.
+Great summons.
+ Nice quests, general sense of a thought out society. Nothing original in the cultures, but it seemed generally alive.
+ Lots of quests, nice main story, long game unless you are going for endless exploration, at ~20-25 hours.
- This kind of animation, while normal for a euro-rpg, is starting to become annoying when compared to what is possible today.
- Awful character designs for most NPCs, blocky hands and faces.
- Meaningless exploration, especially after a point. While the world is beautiful all the important areas or dungeons are locked unless you've received the appropriate quest. Almost nothing to discover or gain if moving through the game without being sent via a quest.
- Broken balance, at least with a fighter, on Normal. After chapter 2 or so (having done all quests of chapter 1 and having upgrades armor, weapons etc), there was literally no challenge. I would receive minimal amounts of damage while killing everything with a couple of blows.
- Lying developers/publishers. This is important to me, and has nothing to do with the main island thing. I never got the big island complaining, so there is an empty island on the map, so fucking what? As long as the game lasts as long as they said.
But the thing is, it doesn't. They claim 20-25 hours for main quest and 100+ (or 150+ ?) if exploring and completing side quests. It was 22 hours for me with countless of side quests completed. It's still good for me, I get bored of never ending games, but why the fuck blatantly lie ?
- Infuriating inventory system.
- An RPG with no total statistics. You have endurance, strength etch, but no overall armor, resistances, only a damage per hit statistic and percentages that mostly make no sense regarding each piece of armor or piece of magical jewelry.
- Bugs, though nothing game-breaking, and having to hack your way to options that should be available, such as AF.
I still cannot decide about the combat. It certainly wasn't great, but some of the special moves options were nice. You can knock down, attack multiple enemies etc, but block and dodge are hardly necessary while there is no locking on specific enemies and you just slash away.
The greatest, by far actually, combat ever for me still remains that of Severance: Blade of Darkness. Just had to say this.
Overall, while the negatives seem to add up now that I look at it, it's a good game, certainly worth buying for anyone who enjoyed euro-RPGs.