“Which of the Two Worlds has a decent framerate?”

Two Worlds, a massive RPG that plays like a cross between Diablo and Oblivion, owes a debt of gratitude to the persistence of hardcore gaming geeks. The potential fun to be had exploring Two Worlds’ massive environments is considerably hampered by a plague of technical issues– framerate drops, glitches, and crashes.

The moments of satisfaction, such as gaining a new level, combining found items to improve your gear, and learning new combat skills, are matched by moments of frustration, absurdity, and befuddlement. When I was first awarded my trusty steed after helping his owner take care of a pesky bandit problem, I knew that horseback travel was absolutely the way to see Two Worlds. However, my horse soon became stuck on every jagged rock or slightly steep incline. The numerous glitches made just moving around the landscape more awkward than it should have been.

The menus also take some getting used to. After Oblivion showed that an Xbox controller could easily navigate an overworld map, Two Worlds completely threw the concept out the window and made planning an adventure quite cumbersome. It’s a chore to find out not only where the next mission objective is, but also to figure out where you are and how to get to it. There are only two levels of zoom for the map– too close, and too far.

The artificial intelligence is also pretty dumb in this game, to the point where you will feel like you are cheating by taking advantage of it. Is that orc too tough for you to take on at a low level? Just jump onto a rock and keep shooting him full of arrows while he swings his axe in futile frustration. Too many bandits on your tail? Just lead them to the nearest health-restoring monument, where you will constantly recharge your life bar even in the middle of combat. You need every bit of XP to get through the beginning areas of the game, and taking advantage of lazy AI is one of the most efficient ways to advance.

Finally, the biggest technical complaint about Two Worlds has to do with the framerate. As a port of a PC game that came out a few months ago in Germany, there’s no sign that this game was completely optimized for the Xbox 360. The framerate is consistently low, causing a choppy slideshow every time I rode my horse through the forest. The game also constantly loads in new areas, causing stuttering and freezing, sometimes causing the game to crash. While you can save at any point, it becomes a necessity to avoid losing valuable progress and experience.

Now that the litany of complaints is out of the way, it’s time to focus on the good. Like Oblivion, Two Worlds is a truly open-world experience, where you can customize your character’s prime attributes and choose the next chapter of your quest. If you want to focus all of your skill points on using a bow and arrow, you can do so at the expense of magic or melee attacks. If you want to ignore the main quest to save your telepathic twin sister Kira, you can just hone your fighting skills on bears, wolves, and wyverns instead. Decisions you make in Two Worlds often have far-reaching effects, and your reputation with a half dozen major organizations from necromancers to merchants is dependent on your choice of alliances.

There’s a lot to do in Two Worlds, and potentially dozens of hours of adventure to be had exploring the massive environments. While the quests aren’t all fascinating, there are still several good opportunities to gain XP, and they’ll ease you into new areas while suggesting more side missions. It’s a classic RPG formula, and it still works so well that it almost makes your forget about the technical glitches.

The graphics, while clearly taxing the capabilities of the Xbox 360, are generally quite good. The environments are the real star here, with lush foliage and gorgeous weather effects. Weapons and gear take second place in the Two Worlds beauty contest, with well-rendered leather jerkins and some intimidating swords, spears, bows, and axes that appear on your character when you equip them. The character models don’t look quite as nice, and they are a step down from those characters seen in Oblivion, which many people didn’t care for. Still, there’s a good amount of character variety within the towns and castles you’ll discover.

The sound effects are mostly unimpressive, with lackluster voice acting. The exception, however, is the music that plays throughout the game. It’s appropriately moody, almost-but-not-quite like Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings score. Your main character will also make plenty of comments in response to changes in the weather or the approach of bad guys, but they don’t have much of an impact on the game.

There are versus multiplayer options over Xbox Live, and a co-op mode that can be found on the character select screen by hitting the Y button. Most of the versus modes perform so poorly over Live that they are practically unplayable, but the developers say they’re working on a way to improve their servers. Perhaps with a local area connection you could have some fun, but if you’ve got friends who want to play Two Worlds with you at your house, you’d be better off trying the tabletop RPG that comes with the collector’s edition instead.

It’s easy to see the similarities to Diablo and Oblivion, and like those games, Two Worlds can become addictive if you allow it to. There’s enough interesting stuff to find in the environments, skills, and loot to encourage players to keep exploring and completing quests, even if their horses do get caught on rocks. Stackable items, branching storylines, and special fighting moves like multi-arrow shots make this game unique among action RPGs. Technical glitches aside, it’s a good game for RPG fans to spend many valuable hours playing. Just be prepared to conquer a clunky user interface and a choppy framerate before you’re able to conquer these worlds.

Update: A PR rep has let us know that the server issues that are affecting performance over Xbox Live are being dealt with. Also, to correct our previous error, the co-op mode isn’t scrapped, it just wasn’t mentioned in the instruction manual. To start a co-op game, hit Y at the online character select screen to create an RPG character.