Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Review

Move for salvation.

I have lost my mind. As a console port of an average MMORPG-styled Diablo-esque hack-‘n’-slash for the PC, Sacred 2 has “OMG, this is gonna hurt” written all over it. Everywhere you look, there is a design flaw, an odd glitch, a reason to throw the game disc into a campfire and prance around performing The Nitpick Dance. (Please consult a professional before attempting this dance in front of publishers who have the almighty power called “the phone call to your boss”.) Any reviewer would be blind not to notice the gameplay holes they would fall into playing this game. But I don’t care.

[image1]Just to play devil’s advocate, though, let me give a rundown of all the claims to my insanity. The panoramic fantasy world of Ancaria is one fraught with monsters, thieves, and heroes – whether you choose to be an undead Shadow Warrior, an angelic Seraphim, or a hound-cyborg Temple Guardian (among others). And you’ll hardly need to hear a word of justification to slay them. Civilized settlements are separated by gigantic masses of undulating terrain that are so dense with enemies that it is a wonder how anyone could think of travel, let alone how every town has not yet been razed to the ground by the swarms of evil minions. Text boxes (generally not voiced unless they are tied to the main quest) frequently pop up on the screen, alerting you to your character’s supposed motivation to save (or destroy, if you are on the Dark campaign) Ancaria with long expositions that you will end up skipping altogether by simply pressing “Accept” or “Decline”.

With all the helplessly annoying people in town with a quest-starting question mark hovering above their heads – wanting you to kill some specific baddies, fetch some teddy bear, or escort their asses somewhere – you don’t have time to read all of their drawn-out requests. Most quests boil down to the same process, anyway: All you need to do is follow the arrow and the “go there” circle, do whatever is required (killing), and gain the quest experience or gold that follows. But even then, most quests don’t award more experience or gold than simply going outside of town for a few minutes and whacking things that can die when you hit them. It would have been better if the effort wasted on creating 80% of all the quests were spent making the other 20% that much stronger.

The list of blemishes goes on. Classes are gender-restrictive, so if you want to be a male elf or a female shadow warrior, you’re out of luck. Since resurrection monoliths are spread more densely than portals, they should have just done away with portals and had the monoliths serve double-duty as portals as well, while eliminating the restriction of only being able to teleport to the last monolith you activate. Mounts make you travel faster but they disable all of your combat arts (unless you have a unique mount for your class, but even then, it will take a long time before you reach the "Unique Mounts" quest). There are five difficulty levels, but you have to unlock the three hardest difficulties, one at a time, by beating the 100+-hour campaign once more. In addition to the graphical pop-up that occurs every time you teleport, glitches occasionally happen like the stationary enemy that can’t attack or die, or the enemy that can attack but can’t die.

Perhaps the strangest choice is the progression for combat arts, which is based on finding runes for the combat art you wish to level up. Instead of increasing all attributes of the combat art, each higher-level combat art requires a longer regeneration time before you can use it again, leading to trade-offs that just don’t seem to be worth it. Is it better to have a combat art that dishes 50 damage every 14 seconds at Level 1 or 58 damage every 17 seconds at Level 2? Umm… err… huh. There’s no obvious choice, especially since any buffs (also combat arts) you activate increases the regeneratation rate of all your combat arts as well.

[image2]As expected for a PC port to the console, the menu interfaces are confined to the “one menu per screen” limitation. Without icons or a grid-based inventory system, the sorted lists just don’t do as quick a job, needing more button presses to do what you want, though a lot more information is provided on each item.

With all these complaints then, why do I keep playing? Why does the player in me refuse to listen to the critic? Three things: exploration, grinding, and multiplayer. Sacred 2 may be an over-designed, unpolished mess at times, but it does what many MMORPG hack-‘n’-slash fans want out of the genre.

The world of Ancaria is a sweeping, continuous landscape that stretches and stretches for what would be in-game miles. In 30 hours of gameplay, I was only able to explore 10% of the map – it’s larger and more diverse than the maps of either Diablo or Oblivion. From treetop jungles, hilly plains, and fiery caverns, to blighted orc-lands, rocky isles, and futuristic temples, the environments are gorgeously crafted and look hand-designed, one model and texture at a time.

Likewise, the assets and level progression for grinding is well-planned and nearly as exorbitant, with plenty of loot and equipment abilities to organize and obtain. As you gain points to your standard attributes and learn combat arts through runes, you will also acquire skill points to distribute throughout a various set of specialized skills. Since you gain the most consistent and proportionally respectable amount of experience by killing enemies that are near your level, grinding will naturally lead you from one less difficult  area to a more difficult one – and it’s admittedly addictive.

The shortcuts that link combat arts, combinations, and the basic attack to the face buttons and shoulder buttons are just as efficient as hotkeys on the keyboard. The only area for improvement in grinding is the lack of rewards spread through Ancaria that produce powerful, unique weapons and armor, but the standard “hack, loot, hack, loot” sequence should yield as many treasures as you possibly need.

[image3]Hands down, the best feature of the transition to the console is the ease of the multiplayer setup, whether it is via Xbox Live or Playstation Network. Pop in a headset, create a game, make sure your friends are in your party, and you’re ready to go (unlike the PC version, which had me change the internal digits of the router, change the port number, and do the hokey pokey to get it to work). Better yet, the free world option remains open, with a cavernous hub that links you from an island exclusive to “free world” mode to the rest of the world. If you want a quick tour of Ancaria or the challenge of exploring a region with enemies that could kill you with a single breath, free world is the way to go.

Sacred 2 lends credence to the claim that console ports in a genre normally reserved for the PC can work. In fact, with the exception of menu interfaces and loading times in towns, this is actually better than the PC version, if just for the fact that it didn’t crash once during my combined 50 hours of playtime. More than just a slap-dash effort, Sacred 2 succeeds because of its rough but focused and raw attention to the essence of its genre.