- Publisher: CDV
- Developer: Ascaron
- Also On: PS3
- ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature
- Genre: Action RPG
- Pros: Huge game world with tons of quests; solid gameplay; playing with friends is a blast
- Cons: Takes a while to really hook you; playing by yourself is boring
Sacred 2 is meant to be played primarily as a multiplayer game. You can play it solo if you want, but the story isn’t really good enough to be a means to keep you playing and, frankly, the game is kind of bland and boring by yourself. Add in three friends, however, and Sacred 2 is suddenly a game that you can pour hours upon hours into.
On the Xbox 360 you can play with two players on one console and also jump into Xbox Live games with other players to round out a party of 4. Online play is full drop in / drop out and other players can come and go as they please and you can, of course, set up the game before you begin to allow only friends (or no one) to join you if you want. The game automatically scales the enemies up or down depending on the number of players as well as their level so that the game always offers a decent challenge.
A lot of the fun in Sacred 2 comes from the fact that the game world is just positively massive. Like, super ridiculously huge. You can spend a dozen hours just in one tiny part of the world and still have 90% of the map to discover. And each area has a ton of NPCs to talk to and just about every one of them has some sort of quest. If this game gets its hooks into you (it does take a few hours before everything “clicks” you’ll be addicted for the long term.
Gameplay
The controls are pretty basic. On the PC you would have to click around with the mouse and “click, click, click” on enemies to kill them. On the consoles you move with the analog stick and then press the face buttons to attack. Each face button can be assigned a different action (weapon attack, spell, etc.) and by holding the trigger buttons you get another set of slots to equip stuff to. The basic idea is that you have a ton of slots to assign actions, so there is no reason you shouldn’t have a key ability or weapon available when you need it.
Character advancement is also interesting. You start off with one of 6 pre-set character classes and as you level up you can assign points to different stats. Everyone playing a given class starts out the same, but as you level up your character will be different from everyone else depending on how you spend your points or what combat arts you choose to learn and develop. It is amazingly deep but takes a good bit of studying to fully grasp.
Graphics and Sound
Graphically, Sacred 2 is a great looking game. It does takes a while to get used to the camera as it defaults to a high overhead view and even if you zoom in and pan around you never quite get the view you want at first. You have to realize that this isn’t Oblivion or Fallout or any other open world RPG you might be used to, and it isn’t about seeing things from a long ways off. This is about fighting up close and personal and you don’t need a long view to do that. When you finally get used to the camera view, you can appreciate the details that you can see such as gorgeous environments that cover a wide range of terrain as well as well animated, surprisingly detailed characters and enemies.The sound is also surprisingly well done. Sound effects and most music mostly fit the genre standard, but they work well. What really stands out are the tracks from German metal band Blind Guardian (there is also a special quest involving the band that is simply awesome) that gives the game a different feel than the normal ye olde tyme fantasy music the comprises most of the soundtrack. The voice work is also interesting. Not because it is particularly high quality, but because of what they say. This game doesn’t take itself too seriously, to put it mildly, which is a rather refreshing break from most every other RPG.
Bottom Line
