Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

"Good for A-RPG fans, not for the rest"

Sacred 2 is a game that could have potentially been amazing, but has fallen short in a few areas. Overall, it's still pretty good if you like the style of gaming, but it's not very forgiving for people who aren't patient RPG fans.

This review will sound fairly unfavorable, but the game overall is a bit better than the sum of its parts.


GRAPHICS 4/10 on non-HD, 8/10 on HD
SOUND 7/10
My opinion here is sullied considerably by the fact that this game was quite clearly designed by people who think only HD televisions exist. Text on this game, by and large, is wholly unreadable unless you put your face against the TV due to the very thin font that I'm sure looks very crisp on HD, but is horrible on my "old" TV. And this game looks quite like a few others I've played that have been reviewed as incredible graphics or seemed awesome at my friends' place, and then been not so hot for me.

The sound is as good as can reasonably be expected for a game of this scope. Considering it features a lot of adventuring, (read: repeating the same motions over and over,) the sounds are not flashy and that's probably a good thing. One interesting thing is that the character does talk occasionally during or after a battle, and the lines are actually diversified and sometimes applicable specifically to that occasion. Ascaron did a decent job with the script for their voice acting...unfortunately, the acting itself isn't wonderful, but it's palatable.


MAIN USER INTERFACE (5/10)
There are two places where the game seriously lacks, and the UI is one of them. (A decent set of instructions somewhere for the game mechanics is the other.)

Because the game can be played online, it does not feature a pause button, which carries over into single player. This can be extremely frustrating. Equally frustrating, the buttons to navigate the menus are an amalgam of bumpers, thumb sticks, and a plethora of different face buttons. If you can get used to the menus, the actual in-game controls aren't too bad, but again, remember there's no pausing, so don't expect to be able to do anything during battle.

The actual controls are interesting, because the four main buttons can each be mapped to a different skill, and then the left and right triggers serve as a secondary set of skills, meaning you can have up to 12 different "hotkeys." Three different potions and one special move are on the thumbpad.

Using abilities is usually fairly easy, but two items do bear special mention. The first is that ranged combat is auto-selected for you on a target. This game is PC-first, and so computer gamers can click their mouse where they want to fire. Console gamers are stuck with a system that automatically targets the current position of their target...and your targets due move back and forth at times, leading to misses simply for lack of control. (Thankfully, the main ranged class does have a special set of weapons that have no flight time.) The other is that some abilities are meant to target specific positions on the ground. To use these, you hold the button for that ability and a green circle appears under your character that you can move -- using the thumbstick usually reserved for walking. Using these abilities is severely limited in their scope since typically they are useful when used at a distance, but your character has to stand still until you finally get the ability to go off where you want it to.


CAMERA (8/10)
A bad camera can easily wreck a good game. Sacred doesn't deal with any major clipping or following issues. When a large object is between the camera and the character, the game does a very good job of making the obstacle transparent. Overall, the camera does what it's supposed to. However, controlling the camera, while fluid, can sometimes be frustrating. It operates on a sliding scale of zoom in/out that, while usually quite good, sometimes is not quite the angle you want. I also sometimes had issues with the camera trying to rotate on me when I didn't want, or going the wrong way when manually rotating, but both of these are configurable. (Static vs follow, invert the rotation)


NAVIGATION (3/10)
To the game's benefit, it has an overhead minimap that serves as a radar, as well as a world map at the press of a button, reminiscent of World of Warcraft. However, there are some sizable differences. First and foremost, the minimap rotates. Always. An option to make it always point north would have been IMMENSELY useful, as it is very easy to get lost in the world, especially with how limited character movement can be in the Z-axis. You *can* press in the right analog stick to make the screen momentarily face north, but that doesn't just change the map, it changes your camera alignment as well.

And navigation is pretty darn important because the world is HUGE. There are some very limited teleportation options and you can purchase a mount to make travel faster, but ultimately you will have to figure out where you are going. The world map is a pretty decent map, and the joy of exploring the map as it turns from gray to colored will please the most avid of explorers, but because the minimap doesn't face north, you have to rely on constantly opening the map just to know if you're still heading toward your destination or not.

Fortunately, for the tons and tons of quests in the game, your objectives are always marked on the world map. The world map gets a big thumbs up from me, but the minimap horribly fails.


ADVENTURING AND QUESTS (8/10)
The game is totally packed with quests. They're sometimes easy to find and sometimes not, but the questgivers show on your radar, so you should find anyone you're exploring near. Once you have a quest, the quests themselves are fairly decent. The writing is ok and the style is very similar to WoW -- collect, kill, or escort -- but there are very few "kill 10 boars" quests. Everything is given with at least some small sense of purpose. The only annoying aspect of quests is that you can almost never refuse them...which is an issue where escort quests are concerned. There are a few too many of them, and the random people that are suddenly following you are a liability if you want to complete everything and actually do it at a reasonable pace. Questing, overall, is pleasant because you grind out your levels not from raw mass slaughter (which you can do) but from actually "doing" something.

However, the world itself, or at least the portion you start in since I've only actually uncovered about 10% of the map so far in a good 12-15 hours of playtime, is very disjoint. As neat as the world is for being huge and continuous, there isn't much that ties the areas together beyond being a really huge forest. The vast wilderness between towns is filled with an overinfestation of brigands, nasty little monsters, and undead the likes of which would make survival in this world impossible. And then out of the blue, there is a massive giant city. The city, for its part, has lots to do in it quest-wise, as you would expect from a population center, and is rather interesting...I'm just wondering where the food comes from that these people eat. =p

You will have to cross a lot of the aforementioned wilderness to get to places because there isn't much of a transportation grid in Ancaria. There are portals at a few places that you can go to from anywhere, and then there are a smattering of resurrection stones. You choose one of these to be your home point where you will go when you die, and you can also teleport to that one location as you would the town portals. For the sheer scope, though, you do a lot of travel by foot. Which doesn't bother me at all since it makes the world "feel real" to an extent, but you will want to by a horse to save yourself some transit.


STORY (5/10)
I suppose the story is decent and the writing is ok. However, there's a lot going on in this world that nobody is telling me. Perhaps if I played the first Sacred, I would actually know what "T-energy" is, and why it's such a big deal. The sidequests are respectable. The main quest, along with occasional actual spoken dialogue, is so-so. This game is meant for the immersive world, not the unfolding saga of the...whatever it is you're doing, which I still don't really know yet. In particular, your character's backstory is pretty minimal, as you're just kind of thrust into the world under laughable circumstances. (Of the three characters I started, one had an ok beginning, one was iffy, and one was completely cheesy.)


CHALLENGE (5/10)
I'm playing this game because my friend bought it and quit soon afterwards. His complaint was that "everything dies in one hit. What's the point in playing with other people, which is what I got this for?" Our two mutual friends and I have discovered that the game does evolve beyond that, even if the enemies are initially very easy to defeat (once you get the controls down and gain a few abilities to use.) Diablo, Dungeon Siege, and other similar games typically have three difficulties, and you have to beat the first to try the second. This game has five, and the first two are available initially...the basic difficulty, bronze, is like playing the game with training wheels and is very easy. Playing on silver actually does put you at risk of death on occasion. And the bosses are nearly impossible to kill, even if they don't kill you. My character is presently level 30 on a scale of potentially 200, but I expect the game to ratchet up as I move forward. Even without that, the enemies do not have static levels -- your opponents match your own level up to a certain cap, which is why starting on silver doesn't get you slaughtered, and also makes it fairly counterproductive to try to get ahead of the power curve like you would in a standard RPG.



CHARACTERS/CUSTOMIZATION (8/10)
Ascaron did a very good job with the characters having very varied feels, but having a lot of flexibility in how you level them. Unfortunately, the system is a little counterintuitive and confusing at times. It's as though they wanted you to not figure out how to min/max your character by not telling you what anything REALLY does or how it works.

Equally counterintuitive is the use of runes. Runes are for learning abilities and for leveling them up. You find them intermittently as you adventure. However, the game's abilities (called Combat Arts) don't use magic or any other resource. They simply have cooldowns. What's funky about leveling up an ability by consuming runes is that it makes the cooldowns longer in such a way that most players will tell you TO NOT LEVEL YOUR ABILITIES! Leveling your character has its own distinct advantages, and those are good enough....weird.

In spite of these limitations, you'll note I still gave this heading an 8. There is a remarkable depth here. Each of the characters can be set up to play a number of vastly different ways, much like Diablo characters. Although I personally enjoy Diablo 2 more because it's *somewhat* straight-forward what you're doing, there is a tremendous level of detail here if you can learn the game mechanics. And that's without talking about equipment, which I'm not even going to get into, other than to say it has a large system of different bonuses and that nearly every item is at least slightly socketable.


MISCELLANEOUS
The game has multiplayer online, up to 4 players in the same world. I haven't tried it, so I can't comment, but I understand it's very similar to single player, but with extra people. The game scales up the difficulty a bit, and doesn't allow people of huge level differences to work together.

The world is freaking huge. This game is a good one to get if you're the sort who only gets one game for their birthday and one for Christmas, and need something that will last a long time. If you're the type that likes to buy a game, beat it as quickly as possible, and then trade it in for the next one, you probably won't find Sacred 2 anywhere near as enjoyable. It's a niche game, and certain people will like it, while others will just be frustrated with it in some way or another.


OVERALL: 7/10 if it's your style of game (lengthy adventure-RPG) and probably best to be avoided if it's not.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/15/09

Game Release: Sacred 2: Fallen Angel (US, 05/11/09)