I've only seen previews at the moment. The release dates I have are the 20th July and the 10th August so a review shouldn't be far away.

I think the combat, magic and AI are all supposed to be fairly different and refreshing.

And to whet your appetite, here's a taster of a few of the features of the game:

Character Development

Pretty much like Baldur's Gate, you earn skill points as you gain XP and get extra skill points when you level up.  These can be distributed amongst your 'skills'.  You start with 13 skills and by visiting NPCs you can learn and train in 25 further skills.

Each skill has 'Ranks', e.g. for melee, missile, general puspose and riding skills you can increase them by 10 Ranks, magic skills can be increased by 15 Ranks.

So you start off with Swimming, Strong Hand, Air Magic, Lockpicking etc and can put points into these to increase how fast you can swim, how much damage you do, what types of spells you can cast and how easy it is to pick locks until you find new skills to diversify yourself with.

Combat

Three main types of combat: Melee, Missile and Mounted.

Melee involves the usual - a longsword will attack differently to a dagger which will attack differently to a polearm, axe or mace.  Some skills can only be used with specific weapons, e.g. Stun can only be used with Blunt Weapons.  Some melee skills are more general purpose, like Dirty Trick which kicks sand into an opponent's eyes.  The more points you put into Dirty Trick the better chance you have at blinding them, but keep in mind it'll never work on an opponent carrying a shield.

Missile is all about bows and arrows and you have lots of skills you can use with archery, like Multi-Arow, Disarming-Arrow, Blinding-Arrow and so on.  You take aim, pull back the string, the longer you pull back the string the more you'll zoom in and the more damage you will end up doing.

Mounted - Riding Skill is the chief skill involved here, the advantage is you can charge in to a group, deal damage, charge back out again quickly before you receive too much damage yourself.  Mounts include lizards, horses, skeletal horses and so on, all with different encumberance attributes, and they'll all get spooked by different things.

Magic

5 schools of magic, you start off with Air and Fire but can also learn Earth, Water and Necromancy.  Earth is mainly defensive, Fire is offensive, Necromancy allows you to make use of dead bodies to provide more allies and so on.  Magic is Tiered: 1 skillpoint allows you to access Tier 1 spells, it takes a total of 15 skillpoints to access the highest Tier, Tier 5.

For an idea of what this means, the Fire School gives you a Fireball spell at Tier 1, at Tier 5 you get Meteor, which, as it sounds, is a little more effective, and before that at Tier 4 you get Summon Devil which sounds a lot of fun.

Magic uses a Card System.  You can also find, buy or steal Magic Cards and stacking two cards of the same type together increases the potency of that spell.  Stack too many of the same type together and you could end up with a mega-spell that does huge damage but you might not have enough MP to cast it.  There are also Booster Cards to be found which give abilities like 'Reduce MP use' and so on.

Alchemy

One of your 38 skills, Alchemy works pretty much the same way it does in Oblivion - harvest plants (which regrow), use bones/bodyparts from corpses, mix them together to make HP Potions, Fire Resistance Potions but also Traps.  You can name your creations and they're then added to your recipe book so you won't forget the recipe.

Reputation

Lots of groups to gain faction with: Merchants Guild, Warrior Guild, Thieves Guild, Mages, Necromancers, 'The Society' and the Karga and Skelden Clans who are at war with each other.  You can pretty much gain faction with all the groups as in Oblivion, however later on when the leader of the Merchants Guild asks you to assassinate the leader of the Thieves Guild and the leader of the Thieves Guild asks you to Assassinate the leader of the Merchants Guild then you have a problem that only you can solve.

Stacking Items

Probably the most unique feature of Two Worlds.  Find two longswords that are the same?  Stack them together in your inventory to get a longsword with 10% more damage.  Combine a Str+1 ring to a Str+2/Dex+1 ring to get a Str+3/Dex+1 ring.  Stacking more of the same together can sometimes produce surprising effects, e.g. 5 pieces of bodyarmor can increase defence the first 4 stacks but add fire resistance on the 5th stack.

There are also gems which can be added to weapons and armor to provide such effects as immunity to poison, fire resistance, fire damage, berserking skill - pretty much Oblivion-esque in this respect.

Cheers for the info FM, definitely one to keep an eye on I think.

There'll be no chance my comp can handle it. Will you be getting the X360 version? If it's out next week, then there should be some reviews floating around of it I can have a look at.

EDIT - Just read your post properly and you said the 360 version, apologies.

Cheers for the tip. It's the online side of things I'm interested in. Not owning a 360 yet I've not really looked into it but do places do a single player review and then an online review a little later once they've spent more time with it?

Play are doing a Premium with Forza 2 for £250, pretty tempting. Think I'll hang on until Halo 3 is out as I'm sure there will be bundles and offers then.

The level scaling*, loot scaling and the fact that you can no longer stack armor and weapons that are too high for your level which allowed you to one-shot everything in the game from about level 10 onwards was pretty drastic.

*Don't panic, it's not as bad as Oblivions, the scaling stops once mobs reach their max level in most cases, e.g. fauna stops scaling up around level 15-20 and you'll still be able to one-shot most things if you put some work and a lot of levels into your character.  Bandits, ogres and cyclops will remain a pain in the butt, but will have loot scaled accordingly, so always worth fighting.

Being able to actually control where your fireballs land is probably the most 'fun' addition that was missing previously, but there are many many other improvements, all listed here.