Imagine if Blizzard said to themselves: "Lets make Diablo in 3D."
Imagine if Bethesda said to themselves: "Lets make Oblivion more fun."
Imagine if a little-known developer called Reality Pump, based in Krakow, Poland, decided to spend 7 years making such a game.

Two Worlds is the result, and lets get the review score out of the way first: 9/10.

Yeah, not a typo, a 9.  Look around at review portals like Gamerankings and you'll see review scores as low as 20%, congealed average scores of 51% and a general flaying by the games press.  It's like a collective mind decided that after all the goodness recently of Rainbow Six, Blue Dragon and Bioshock that they really needed to let rip on something and Two Worlds was an obvious candidate.

I'm not even going to hazard a guess at what Edge will bother to give it, but maybe there's a billion to one chance their reviewer will read this and be reminded that games are about having fun, Two Worlds is armed to the teeth with it.

Your first impressions of the game might not agree.  You just spent 10 minutes designing your character, which has to be a male human for the offline RPG side of things otherwise you'd have a female elf running around  shouting "Have at ye" in a deep tenor.  You've agonised over which of the four hairstyles to go with and spent another 5 minutes tweaking brow sizes, chin sizes, cheek fatness and wondering if they'll actually make any difference.

Then the game starts and you get a complete stranger appear in the first cutscene.  That's actually you, but they didn't implement all the tweaks you just made because this scene is prerendered.  Sorry.  Not a great start.

Cut scene ends and there you are!  If you bothered to read the manual you'd realise that you've arrived in Koromin a few months after the previous cut scene because you've received a letter hinting at how to find your sister, meantime you're making your way in the world as a mercenary for hire to make ends meet.

And so it begins.  The local village elder wants you to clear out the local temple, a couple of Grom squatters are residing there and need taking care of.  Armed with your little 3-7 Bludgeon Damage Hatchet you step into a little tutorial that shows you how to open doors, run around, shoot a bow (which is fun), use magic (which is tricky until you get to grips with the hotkey system and how to beef up your magic damage with booster cards), search bodies, open chests, use a torch, jump, and generally cut things to pieces with melee in the most effective way possible.

After the tutorial ends, you're dumped outside the temple with vague directions back to town and the rest is up to you.  The world awaits!

You'll find at first that your little 3-7 Damage Hatchet just isn't going to hack it, but it'll take a while before you can upgrade it to a 1923-2300 Damage Dual Wield Katana with added 1200 Spirit Damage.  To do this you need to undertake quests for the local villages, which at first will take you all over the northern part of the map and introduce to you villages terrorised by Ice Ogres, pesky Dwarves infiltrating the mines of the region, a lucrative moonshine trade to the west, lots of Groms and Bandits to take care of and of course lots of stuff to level on, mainly wolves, boars and bears.

Completing quests gives rewards in terms of gold and experience, but some quests raise your faction with certain outfits, like the Merchants Guild, who will start giving you discounts on their wares, or the Brotherhood who will start letting you into more of their areas, or the Skelden and Karga clans who are at each others throats, or the Necromancers and Mages who will give you access to more powerful spells to wield.

The main quest, which involves you attempting to rescue your sister who is being held hostage, will gradually drag you further south as you seek out the relic items demanded by her captors.  South also means you'll see less of the usual critters, you'll be up against Ogres, Cyclops, Giant Spiders, Wyverns, Orcs, Dragons and many, many more as you hack, slash and nuke your way through the opposition.

You'll encounter many varied environments on your journey; harsh deserts, open woodlands, misty boglands, haunted forests, skeleton-infested (weak against blunt!) caves, fields of bamboo inhabited by strange giant insects, underground vaults, bandit camps, outposts, deserted castles, open beaches, ramshack villges, and whole cities filled with the deadly Orcs.

Travel is aided with the ability to warp (after successful completion of the warp quests) at any time.  So if you discover your inventory is full just drop a warp stone, warp to the nearest town to sell up, then warp straight back, collect your warp stone and get on with the killing.  You can also collect various types of mount, including regular horses (bays, greys, black), orcish mounts (how Wes Craven would draw a horse I guess) and skeletal horses (necromancer's best buddy).  Unless you've ridden a horse in real life you'll probably try to steer these things like you would a car and get frustrated, but if you are a born equestrian you'll remember that horses have a mind of their own and won't gallop full pelt up a hill or through a rock; you'll probably be delighted at how accurate they've got the riding physics in fact, especially when horsey jumps over a little tree stump for you.

Along the way you'll be able to loot gold, gems for uprading your armour and weapons, new swords, maces, bows, spells, alchemy ingredients to make permanent enhancement potions, and each time you level up you'll be able to throw a few more points into your characters main attributes (e.g. HP and Str for your warrior types, Willpower for your Mage types, Dex for your Thief types) as well as throw a couple of points into your skills, some of which are passive (stoneskin, natural protection), some of which are active (fire magic, summon demons at will to help you out).

You'll also need to explore the wilderness and local cities for trainers who will teach you new skills so you can throw points into those too, like multi-arrow, lockpicking, stun, the other schools of magic you've yet to try out and my personal favourite, a skill that lets you thrust a lit torch into someone's face to blind them before you crack them over the head with a mighty club.

Highlights include no death penalty, you just revive at the nearest Shrine to where you snuffed it and remind yourself to brew some anti-poison potions.

So you've got this vast world to explore, a huge (colossal!) amount of quests to find and undertake, a vast variety of armour and weapon types to play around with, an arsenal of spells to build up (125 of them), and the freedom to develop your character into anything you want, be it warrior, battle mage, sword dancer, thief, assassin, paladin, psychotic necromancer, you name it, total freedom and a veritable host of bad guys to slay.

If you can put up with the occasional freeze while the area loads as you travel through it, the rare total freeze (especially when it's raining, save frequently during sunny spells!) and the criminal overuse of the words 'nay', 'prithee', 'mayhap', 'perchance', 'pray' and 't'was' (even the voice actors sometimes rebel and slip in 'it was' instead) then you'll be in your element.

There is also the fabled 'online' mode.  The main online game consists of you arriving with up to 7 other mates in an instanced version of Two Worlds, same towns and villages but only about 10% of each area is included in each instance.  Run around and complete quests together if you can, defeat viciously tough monsters together if you can, or step in solo and begin your item-fest-must-become-the-highest-level-player grind, but you'll get your butt kicked by the first thing you meet until you manage to gain a few levels.

Also included are various 'fun' modes including Deathmatch, Horse Stealing, Monster Hunt and straight up 1 v 1, although for these particular modes you're given a 'set' character, you can't actually level up or anything, just use the skills and items your character is equipped with.

Personally these things don't really appeal, although I have spent time running away from wolves in online RPG.  I was gutted that after 3 hours I went to save and the game froze before it managed to put anything on my Hard Drive so that put me off a bit.

You're lucky I took time out to write this review because I'm totally hooked on the single player, nothing else has been near my XBox 360 since last Friday.  And at £29.99 you can't really go wrong.  (When I bought it from Gamestation it was £24.99 but they sold out so fast they must have figured adding another fiver for when they get more stock in was a good idea).

Hence the 9.  When games are this much fun I can't score them any lower, but 1 point deducted for the various glitches.  Some people can't cope with bugs in today's games and knock off 8 points, their loss.