Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

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I love me some RPGs. I also love me some offline 2-player coop games, a residual effect of having grown up on Atari and NES platforms. So it is a rare day indeed when an offline 2 player RPG coop comes down the pike. Unfortunately, this one does more to reveal what is missing from a good RPG than to stand out on its own.

Sacred 2 is basically a poor man's Diablo 2. It has good visuals, but that's about where any favorable comparison ends. For example, combat in Sacred 2 is fairly uncertain and frustrating -you can cast a spell that goes right through someone without injuring them, or continue standing in place and swinging a sword and hitting someone who is running away over a distant hill. It really drops you out of the game when you can actually "feel" the combat code locking you into a fight with a foe, artificially rotating your character and triggering combat moves and the like, instead of just intelligently dealing damage like Diablo 2 did. Btw, Diablo 2 came out like a decade ago.

A variety of other frustrations require you to actively ignore elements of the game in order to enjoy it -never a good idea in a game:

1) Horrible, hammy in-jokes by the programmers. I don't even try to read the "hilarious" gravestone warnings anymore. And the catchphrases spouted by your characters are beyond atrocious. Remember how annoying it was for Anakin Skywalker to shout "Yippie!!!!!!!!" in The Phantom Menace? Well, apparently the 1 person in America who loved that movie ended up working on Sacred 2, particularly the Seraphim character. She shouts that phrase about every 5 dead monster. I recommend playing with earplugs.

2) Numerous broken skills. For example, on the PS3, the Blacksmithing skill doesn't even work. At all. Good thing I told you that before you built up that level 40 warrior, right? Wish someone had told me. Another skill claims that it will unlock "additional powers" of various divine relics that you pick up, in addition to their basic armor boosting abilities. Like an antidote relic might do more than give you more poison "armor". At least, that's what the skill says. However, pumping points into it does exactly nothing. 30 points later, I finally looked it up online and apparently none of the relics actually have any other attributes you can unlock. Another character goes onto the trash heap.

3) Extremely elaborate skill system. If you even figure out what fraction of player skills actually work, pumping them up and distributing related "modification" points is confusing in the extreme. Modification points are additional points that might make a given skill do more damage, or last longer, or have a greater area of effect, or the like. They are in addition to just pumping up a skill directly from runes or skill points. Get it? Me neither. Anyway, they unlock at seemingly random, and you get trapped in the "modification" page, so sometimes you end up having to modify and waste points on a skill you never use just so you can get back to the game. Better still, the higher a skill level, the longer it takes for cooldown between uses. The game itself warns you to NOT make skill levels high quickly, because you won't be able to use them often. Fantastic.

4) Every fetch quest known to man. "Fetch" quests are common quests in RPGs where you have to get Vial X or Lump of Metal Q and take it back to NPC Y to do something. Who cares what. Well, this game has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of those quests. They are everywhere. Seemingly every single person in the game world has a burning problem, and none of them can solve them alone. It's all up to you. I had a 45th level undead warrior character chasing rabbits around a city park. They're faster than you can run, so eventually he had to go buy a longbow for the sole purpose of helping a groundskeeper kill rabbits. Again: rabbits. What makes this worse is that once you wise up and start ignoring these people, you actually miss some good stuff. 99.9% of the quests are worthless time sinks that require you to run or teleport halfway across the globe to recover someone's teddy bear (actual quest!) but that 0.1% of real quests will net you a unique longsword that deals 250 damage or permit you to, say, actually use Runemasters. It's beyond annoying -it makes you wonder if the game is actually a gigantic social experiment thrown together by our space ant overlords to see how well we could be trained to chase sugar cubes across the galaxy. Answer: quite well.

5) Loot. Most of everything you find is garbage. However, occasionally, completely at random, you will find unique armor or the like. Unless you happen to see a suspicious name pop up when auto-collecting another field full of trash ("Axe," "Broken dagger," "Alex's Firey Blaster Mace of Tyrannical Justice," "Boots"), odds are you will just sell it by accident at some point. Better still, many items are class-specific AND CANNOT BE TRADED DURING OFFLINE COOP. So if your warrior picks up that unique magic staff that only a dryad can use, the only way to give it to your friend is to sell it to a shopkeeper, and then spend millions of gold pieces buying it right back with a dryad character. Brilliant.

6) Uniques. Most foes are a dime a dozen. There are vast fields filled with annoying kobolds just waiting to lard up your inventory with worthless equipment. To paraphrase the Matrix, for the longest time I wouldn't believe it, but then I saw those fields with my own eyes. So too will you discover the beaches of a Million Identical Pirates, or the Forest of a Thousand Nearsighted Wolves. But the truly interesting monsters are unique. Once you kill them, they apparently never ever come back. For example, one time I followed this random river deep into the mountains. It kept going and going and going. And going. Honest to god, a good 30 minutes later, I popped out into this cave in which I was assaulted by a gigantic, screen-filling dragon. It was AWESOME. Then I killed that dragon, and got some mediocre loot. Later, after some saves and reloads, I went back. Dragon was still dead. Confused, I checked online, and learned I had killed one of maybe 7-8 dragons in the entire game. If I want to fight it again, I have to start all over again -including a reset of the eleventy zillion quests I'd already completed. If it was a quest-related foe, I might understand -but why purposefully make it so you can't fight any of the FUN monsters more than a few times? Why??

A related annoyance is that monster difficulty can vary wildly, and XP is related. Now when I start a new character, I simply take an hour and sprint -literally running and ignoring everything -until I reach the desert area where I can actually stock up on XP. It's far, far faster than popping skeletons on the head for 7 XP a whack.

7) Two player offline coop is very lukewarm in terms of fun. This is probably the kicker for me. Basically, one character starts a typical quest, and the other joins as the character class of their choice. In addition to the stupefying idiocy of not actually being able to trade with each other directly, it's also random as to who the computer will even permit to pick up dropped loot. Sometimes you can, sometimes your friend can -and it bears no relation to which person opened the chest, which killed the foe, or anything like that. You just have to hope for the best. Having two players also reveals enemy pathfinding to be a joke: foes usually gang attack one player and ignore the other. You can kite a vast herd of foes in a circle with your friend as the hub and your friend can just kill and kill and kill and nobody notices. It's even more hilarious when you have NPCs travelling with you because of some stupid travel quest you may have picked up -some NPCs, apparently chosen at random, are immortal. I've had NPCs in full plate with magical swords die almost immediately (you fail the quest, of course), while at present my 38th level Temple Guardian has an accompanying NPC fishwife -literally an unarmed woman who screams and runs away at the sight of a foe -traveling with him for a good 20 levels. She won't die. She can't die. And she's awesome at drawing all the incoming fire. It's like a Monty Python skit where she just runs by screaming in one direction, we blast her pursuers with magic or arrows, she runs back screaming in the other direction, etc etc.

All told, Sacred 2 could have used about another 6 months of development work. Some of its foibles are traced back to the old PC game and apparently were deemed "good enough" to keep (although I note that game at least had Dragons come back to life so you could fight them again) but others are sheer laziness. If there are character skills that don't work at all, and players cannot trade items, your game should not be released. It's just one of those rules gamers have collectively decided upon.

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I've been waiting for a good hack 'n slash for the PS3 for a while, like Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath. In some respects, this fits the bill but it is lacking in others.

First of all, this game is pretty complex. Learning about forging, runes, and upgrading Combat Arts takes some time. I've been playing for a few hours and am just starting to feel like I understand all of this. Also, the quests are plentiful, so it can be interesting trying to keep track of them all and determine the order in which you'd like to do them.

I found several frustrations with the "couch co-op", or offline multiplayer. There is no way to zoom in the camera for this mode, and the camera is zoomed pretty far out, so the characters are pretty small. Also, there is no way to trade between characters in this mode (currently), so it can be annoying when one person picks up some cool gear that is meant for the other person. I did find that drops are so plentiful, though, so this may not be a big issue later on when lots of stuff is being picked up by both parties.

The combat is fun and the world is huge.

Once I felt like I knew that I was doing, I've been having a lot of fun questing, exploring, and trying out the various combat arts.

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This is a solid dungeon crawl. Plenty of loot, and lots of Diablo style killing. There are a few things that are curiously absent from the game. First, the ability to customize your character. I know this is a small thing in the bigger game picture, however not being able to change the gender of your character is odd. Even stranger is they give you two options for hair and eight or so hair colors. RPG games tend to be all about customizing your character, and you really can't do this in Sacred 2. Maybe they will add some more options in a patch or future release, but for the time being you are sort of stuck with the few flat character options.

The character classes are all solid. Nothing too exciting. The Temple Guardian is sort of silly, but unique (he is a laser totting Egyptian robo-dog). There is a token spell caster (elf), warrior (shadow warrior), ranger (dryad), and warrior mage (seraphim in the light campaign, inquisitor in the shadow campaign). These are all rough descriptions of the classes, as combat is central in the game so one way or the other it all comes down to your weapon load out.

Being able to play co-op is a huge for a game in this genre. One major complaint, you can't give items to the other player if you are playing co-op on the same PS3, which is really odd. I have no idea why the programers would have set things up this way.

All in all it is a fun game. If you enjoyed Diablo this is a good option for the PS3. Nothing really unique or original here, but not a bad game either.

I heard there were a number of glitches with the game right out of the box. When I put the game in my PS3 it auto-updated, and I can't say I have had any major issues with the game.

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My husband and I bought this game because it's an RPG with a multi-player (offline) option. Not many games allow cooperative play, especially in the RPG genre, and whenever one comes out we scoop it up.

This particular game also offers gorgeous graphics, lots of customizable player options, and tons of potential playing time in a huge, well-developed fantasy world.

With all these ingredients pulling in its favor, it is frustrating as you go along to discover one stupid oversight after another by the developers, who in all their success in creating this vast adventure seemed to have forgotten a few crucial details which would have made this game really amazing.

Prime irritations:

1. The game cannot be paused. Let me repeat that: the game cannot be paused. This includes times when the player is consulting the map or inventory screen, at which time enemies can approach and maim your distracted character (at which time the border of said screen flashes red), forcing you to quit those screens and return later, again at his or her peril.

2. The game logistics are IMMENSELY complex, and the manual explains NONE of them. We are 40 hours in, and I still can't always judge whether one piece of armor is better than another. You find yourself asking (your fellow player, or the air, since you can't ask the manual) lots of questions that are hard to answer via intuitive investigation, and left frustrated as to what half the basic terms used to describe your inventory even mean.

3. Two players in offline cooperative play can pick up armor that would be potentially useful to another, but cannot trade. This would be less frustrating if the "trade with player" option did not constantly pop up. That option is, apparently, only for trading items with online players using other consoles. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. "Yes, we'd love to trade, but you won't let us, so stop asking!"

4. The "trade with player" option appears whenever two cooperative players are nearby one another. To trade (or attempt pointlessly to do so), you push L1. You also push L1 to inspect/open treasure chests, open doors etc. Thus, two players seeking to open/inspect nearby chests, doors, etc. end up inadvertently opening the "trade" screen which, of course, tells you that trading is impossible. Awesome.

6. Jerking graphics and freezing are rare, but do occur, especially in certain areas. There is one annoying town where the game requires a lot of loading, and we've had to reset several times due to freezing.

7. The landscapes are really beautiful, but navigating the topography is completely infuriating. Your super-strength magical character who can shoot magic out of every orifice and smite every enemy is unfortunately burdened with the Achilles heel of being unable to climb a slight incline or step over a small shrub, much less a fence or fallen log. And this particular landscape is replete with inclines, shrubs, fences and fallen logs. The circuitous routes required by this feature are truly ridiculous, especially inside the towns. It isn't always obvious when a way will be blocked, which often means running around in circles and getting stuck until you chance on the exact spot where the ground is sufficiently devoid of bumps to let you pass.

I think those are most of the things that have caused us to rip out our hair during this game so far. Still, there is lots to enjoy about the game, too. The developers could end a lot of the frustrations with a few minor fixes, the easiest of which (it seems to me) would be to expand the manual. That would REALLY help. Really.

Most of all, I'm glad someone is still trying to make games like this. I wish there were a lot more like it, and would and will continue to brave any number of glitches and deficiencies for the pleasure of an action RPG with cooperative multiplayer play.

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I actually own two copies of Sacred 2, that is how much I loved the first game. I own the PC version and PS3 version but for a reason. The PC version (I am on Vista x64) just wouldn't run right for me no matter what drivers I used, vista patching etc. It has been the only PC game I own that ever gave me nonstop problems and I wasn't about to build a new PC just to play one game :P So I purchased this for PS3 to be able to just sit back and enjoy (I purchased this May 2009, for PS3 Jan 2010... re-installed it up a few weeks ago to replay it for reviewing)

GAMEPLAY

Sacred 2 changed very little from the original game, Sacred. This is a good thing as the system they had in place was just amazing I thought. Combat is handled very similar to Diablo and other point/click hack n' slash games just on the PS3 you just move and the game will auto target for you and outline the mob you are attacking. While this really was helpful vs blind hack n' slash... at times you might end up selecting the wrong mob because it path'd by and have to reacquire the mob you were pounding on. There is even mounted combat! The entire game is going to be pretty much sending you on a giant quest throughout the vast map Sacred 2 has to offer. With so much to offer here is a breakdown of what Sacred 2's gameplay will throw at you

1. Hordes of mobs! Mobs mobs everywhere . It is raining mobs sometimes with how many show up. This provides nonstop hack n' slash action but with so much combat going on I actually began to get a little bored with the unnecessary combat. To much of a good thing perhaps but there is no downtime in Sacred 2.

2. Skill / Combo System Mobs will drop skill charms that you use to increase your skill level often increasing effectiveness at the cost of cool down time. You can take charms for skills you don't have and trade them for a skill charm of your choice. There also is a combo system you can advance by spending skill points. Map skills to the combo button and with a single cast of the combo you could perform multiple skills at once. Very helpful just be cautious of skills with different cooldown values

3. Quests tons upon tons of them in fact, after the first 15hrs of gameplay I began to get bored with the quests. They are very repetitive and are "fetch" quests pretty much. GO run and kill this mob and return. Kill this guy to get this item . Kill x mobs. Not that this isn't bad but after your 50th quest to go kill a bunch of mobs for quest drops you'll start twitching. By the time I got about 3/4 through the game I simply did storyline quests only and just ran past towns. There are just an insane amount of quests to do; it is just a shame they are incredibly repetitive.

4. LOOT! if you enjoyed diablo/diablo 2 or two worlds/two worlds 2 where loot basically rained from the sky this is going to be loot heaven. Only problem I had is that just like in other hack and slash RPGs, the loot often is just total junk. I found better items at vendors

*** I found the PC handled far better than PS3 when it came to managing inventory, controls etc. There is no replacement for a good mouse/keyboard in games like this ***

GRAPHICS / SOUND

For its time, Sacred 2 has some pretty good graphics. The PC easily is superior to the PS3 version but nothing to the point that ruins the PS3 version. Armor and weapons look very detailed, maps look very high quality and crisp coloring. Mobs are detailed well but I did run into some hiccups if you would sprint through heavily detailed areas; loading times were actually very short when I did run into them. *** SOUND was actually average in my book. Weapon sounds, effects, voices were actually not bad however the repetitive nature of combat dialogue did get very annoying, fast. The Music was really really good! Blind Guardian did a few songs in the game and you actually will hear them in game when visiting towns and there supposedly is even a quest where you meet Blind Guardian (in game, their "sacred" likeness') but I never ran across it (might of skipped it w/o realizing it)

REPLAY / STORY

Sacred 2 takes place BEFORE Sacred in terms of storyline . If you played Sacred you will recognize some elements from sacred that gives a little more background to events in Sacred; but you are not missing much if you never played Sacred before. The storyline isn't bad but does lose some of its punch if you consistently do your side quests. This is because there are just so many side quests so there is a lot of downtime between the storyline quests. Replay value is exactly what you might expect from like Titan Quest, or Diablo. Multiple difficulty levels that will turn your Super Powerful character into a newbie all over again. Rinse and repeat pretty much as you continue to get stronger and stronger. I enjoy that element as replaying the campaign is a whole new experience. You still get better item, stronger armor sets and bosses require new strategies sometimes, just keep in mind you are redoing the same side-quests all over again ^_^

OVERALL (79% 7.9/C+)

Is sacred 2 a great game? No... a good game YES. There is plenty to do, with tons of mobs to fight and lots of quests to keep you busy. However things do get repetitive and there are some broken elements to this game that hampers gameplay(will be in pro/con section below) Sacred 2 scores a 79% (7.9 / C+) in my book just missing the mark of a 4 star game. A few more months of polish and some better quest variety would of made this game a much more enjoyable trek. I'll be honest, if you had a choice between Sacred 2(PC) and Titan Quest(PC) I'd pick Titan Quest.. BUT Sacred 2 is a decent game but expect to start finding some tediousness after 20-25 hrs

PROS

Great skill/combo system setup

Tons upon tons of loot and wide variety of gear

Classes are generic but handle very well for their specialties

World map is MASSIVE

Tons upon tons of quests (to many I think) , and Loads of mobs to hack, slash, nuke etc

Mounted Combat

CONS

Combo system is buggy sometimes especially with skills that have varying cooldowns. Your combo might say "READY" to use, but will only attack twice then stop not sure why the combo cooldowns don't match the longest cooldown skill bound to it

Blacksmith was very iffy and in fact I stopped using it by level 30 because I was finding far better drops

Skill leveling was very unbalanced sometimes. I would upgrade a skill and get +1.5s cooldown for basically +20dmg?! So NOT WORTH upgrading but you have to for stronger skills at higher difficulties. (not every skill level had this problem and it was only with certain skills)

Quests are just far to generic and repetitive. By the time you are 70% or so through the game you might find yourself so sick of questing only to find out you only did 60% of the quests and still have 90+ more side quests to go for 100% completion

Mob XP and targeting is iffy. Sometimes I found myself doing quests in areas I was getting barely any XP for yet it was where I had to be for my storyline quest(easy to overlevel an area at times) and on PS3, auto targeting can sometimes play games with you

** As you can see, in my book this game has lots of pros and cons... many of the Cons could of been resolved with some polishing. Sacred 2 is a good game that did improve upon the original but just did not improve enough to put it in the heavy hitter category **