Sacred

"Sacred No More"

A few short years after the release of Diablo II, Ascaron Entertainment decided to develop a Diablo style action RPG of their own. The game was entitled “Sacred”, and was one of the first, post-Diablo II action RPGs to do a lot of things right. In fact, some even hailed it as being greater than Diablo II due to many updated features and an updated graphical presentation.

I won't lie, Sacred really does do a lot of things right, and this may not be apparent from my review score. I had a tremendous amount of fun playing this game, but it ended up getting bogged down and I was no longer able to endure the tedium that Sacred evokes.

First things first, there are a few different versions of Sacred, so I'll let you know that I played the Sacred Plus retail version, which has some additional content for the base game and all of the patches and bug fixes.

The install of the game was simple and the game ran perfectly without a hitch the entire time I played it. It also does a full install, so you don't need the DVD every time you play it, which is nice.

Sacred is a top-down action RPG, much like Diablo II, and it does steal quite a bit from Diablo, but it often puts some unique twists on the gameplay style that makes things feel a little more fresh than the average Diablo clone.

Before embarking on your quest, you can choose from one of six, very enticing character classes. The classes are: Gladiator, Seraphim, Dark Elf, Battle Mage, Vampiress, or a Wood Elf.

The cool thing about these character classes is that they are all powerful, and most of them excel in both ranged and hand to hand combat. So you never feel like you are underpowered for any given confrontation. You are able to quickly switch back and forth between ranged and close combat with the touch of a key, so it's a nice little option to have, even though it's wise to stick to a more specialized character build which favors either ranged or melee combat.

After this, you can select your difficulty from Bronze or Silver. Noobs should start out on the Bronze difficulty, but you can export your character at any time to Silver difficulty and carry your stats over with you. There are also two more difficulty levels which can be unlocked after you beat the game on Bronze and Silver difficulty.

The higher difficulties provide more of a challenge and the enemies give better drops. In other words, you have a higher chance of getting rare and unique equipment while playing the harder difficulties.

During the game, I played as a Wood Elf, so my review will be based off of this. The Wood Elf is really a jack of all trades and can excel in melee or ranged combat depending on how you distribute your attribute and skill points. The Wood Elf can also use Nature Magics, which involve plant attacks, buffs, and healing spells. I really liked playing as the Wood Elf, it's a very flexible class and it gives you tons of options in battle. The Wood Elf class deepens even further when you realize that you can also make them primarily a caster with really strong nature magics. So basically you have three main options within this one character class, which is really cool. Figuring out where to spend you skill points can often be quite difficult. Not because there are so many wrong decisions, but because there are so many right decisions.

This is just a small example of one of the classes in Sacred. You can see how deep the classes are, and this is why I'm not going to explain all of the other classes, because it would take up my entire review just to tell you about them.

Well I actually have a lot to talk about with this game, so I'll get right to the review. I'm sure most people that have played Diablo or a Diablo clone before know what to expect from the game in general.


Graphics 7/10

Graphically, Sacred is a step up from Diablo II. Granted it's four years newer, but you can really tell that a lot of attention went into the look and style of the game. The game can be viewed through three different cameras, a standard camera, an up close camera, or a long shot camera. However, the only one that I found worth using was the standard camera, but the action looks good regardless.

You will be spending a lot of time in outdoor environments during the game, so it's a good thing the environments are detailed and they provide enough unique features that you will be able to tell one area apart from another.

You will also be delving into quite a few caves and dungeons along the way. Some of these are short, but the later dungeons can be quite lengthy. Usually the dungeons involve a quest of some kind. While in the caves and dungeons, you lose some visibility, but you will still be able to make things out okay.

Sacred also has some pretty advanced water effects. A lot of the early on areas are parted by water, and running up to the edge of the water and watching it flow is an adventure in itself.

All of the enemies are detailed and are easy to distinguish from one another, even when you are getting mobbed by 20-30 orcs or goblins. Enemy and character animations all look good and the framerate stays solid the entire time.

Overall it's a pretty solid graphical presentation. Nothing too ground breaking, but it's consistent and free of slow down, despite the often busy screen.

Sounds and Music 6/10

The sounds and music are both pretty forgettable in Sacred. They sound very similar to all other action RPGs and the game can pretty much be played without any sound if you choose to.

The music in the overworld is more gentle and quiescent, but when you encounter enemies, the music increases in intensity to give some ambiance to the battles.

One thing I really liked about this game were the little quips that the characters threw out after they killed enemies. This does not happen every time they kill enemies, it seems kind of random. Hearing my female Wood Elf scream out “That's what happens when you hit a lady!” just never seemed to get old. Each character has quite a few of these which they say from time to time.

The sounds and music are not bad, just average. I still have yet to play a PC RPG with better music than Divine Divinity.

Story 3/10

I really shouldn't even score Sacred on the story, since it pretty much doesn't have one. You simply go from town to town, solving quests that random people throw at you. There is supposed to be a single main quest which you can follow, but it's very easy to get lost in the side questing and exploration elements of the game.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, this game is almost completely non-linear. The developers state that 70% of the entire world is open to the player from the start, which is quite a lot, given the size of this game.

In any given town, there will be NPCs that will offer up some side quests for you to do. These can be done for some nice rewards, and often make you forget about the main quest entirely. The other non-quest giving NPCs all have frivolous things to say and it's not even worth your time talking to anyone without a question mark over their head.

So this game is basically a leveling, grind fest, but that's not really all that bad, when you consider that it's pretty fun to play. For the most part.

Gameplay 6/10

The gameplay in Sacred is very reminiscent of other point and click action RPGs. It's scintillating at times, but there are moments when you'll want to throw down your mouse in frustration.

The first thing you will notice is that the controls are rather obtuse and they will take a little bit of time to get used to. The menus will also take a bit of time to get used to, as will the leveling system and the skill launching.

While trudging from location to location, you will get attacked by enemies very frequently. This is standard fare for point and click action RPGs, but Sacred has something that totally throws the balance of the game off: re-spawning enemies. This is the main thing that turned me off about the game.

Re-spawning enemies can be okay in this type of game within reason, but Sacred throws wave after wave of enemies at you and it's not even possible to clear most areas. This makes exploration and traveling quite a chore and really ruined the otherwise decent gameplay for me.

Since you are swarmed by so many enemies, you will have no trouble leveling, but this creates another problem. Since you are constantly getting ambushed by enemies, it will not take long for your character to out-level the opposition. This leads to constant battles with low level enemies which basically give you next to no exp.

It's obsessive to the point of taking one step out of the towns will already net you a trail of enemies chasing you down. Not only this, but when you retreat back into town, they will follow you and you must dispose of them in town, while the mindless puppet NPCs stand around like idiots.

You will get more skill slots as you level, but there is no way to use hotkeys to quick launch skills. You must select the skill from the menu and then fire off the spell with the right mouse button. This makes casting multiple spells quite cumbersome and your better off leveling one or two skills and sticking to those.

You can also build skill combos which fire off multiple skills at once, but the re-charge time is quite long and pretty much makes it not worth bothering with.

There are also broken quests, a useless socketing system, and some horrible path finding that runs the game.

Despite this, there are lots of good things about the game. The game plays pretty solid, and it can get quite engrossing to those that are able to get into it. You can also unlock portals in most towns which will allow you to quickly travel from one location to another with ease.

Horses are also a nice option in Sacred. Since the land is so huge, you will get a horse early on, and be able to use it to traverse the over world much faster. It's a great concept, but it just leads to even more enemies following you, which amass at a much faster rate. Then you must dismount from the horse while the low level enemies attempt to wail on you, buff, and then take them out. It's rather annoying and you will be following this pattern over and over.

For the most part Sacred plays pretty well, and the 6/10 for gameplay may not truly reflect on how I felt while playing the game, but looking back, the game could have easily been tweaked to avoid these flaws.

Longevity and Re-playability 8/10

Sacred has the largest single player world map I have ever seen in a game. Nothing else even comes close. After 12 hours of play, I had only uncovered a little over 2% of the total world map, which is mind numbing. I just got tired of running around and aggroing swarm after swarm of enemies and then being forced to fight myself out of the constant quagmire.

Conclusion

Sacred is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, it's just poorly thought out and I can't see why they didn't fix the re-spawn rate in order to make the game more playable. It's a shame really, this game had plenty of potential.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/07/08

Game Release: Sacred (US, 03/25/04)