Sacred Gold

This game starts very fun but gets boring very quickly. I did finish it, but after ~25% completion I just kept sprinting to the next main objective. One thing this game does very well is the audiovisuals. It has a memorable soundtrack and it looks nice and colorful. The variety of environments do add to the overal colorfulness. Many other games of this genre tend to go for the gloomy gothic look. But this one is your typical fantasy with green meadows, icy mountains, volcanoes, swamps and deserts. And I like it this way. The other very strong point of this game are complex character classes. There's 8 of them and each has a variety of abilities which make room for lots of different playstyles even within each class. The Wood Elf has multiple ways of dealing with enemies with her bow, but maybe you prefer to turn her into a nimble melee fighter? Or she can use magic too. Heal, summon, poison, root enemies in place. All the classes are really fun. Unfortunately, here's where the positives end, since this game is a pile of all bad design decisions this genre has to offer. Here's a list: -spammable consumables, especially health potions; -enemies drop way more stuff than your inventory space allows. Combine with the previous point, since the consumables take inventory space too and don't even stack. -all skills are unlockable very, VERY early in the game, making character progression uninteresting. Basically by levelling up you only increase passive stats. -enemies level up with you, so you don't even feel these stats increase; -enemies respawn, and they do respawn fast. So doesn't matter which area of the world you're exploring, it's the same wall of respawning enemies of the same level. -unreadable map -a very common bug puts a marker for your next main story objective in the wrong place. You're going to waste an hour, then check online to learn where to go. The story is uninteresting, but I don't play such games for the story anyway. Only for genre enthusiasts.

First of all, sorry to give a review of a unfinished game but it was too annoying for me... Story of my life : this game was the third I bought on GOG, back in 2009, at a time when I was looking for similar games to Titan Quest (which I really liked), what remains 7 years later ? In fact sacred sums up what can go wrong with the hack'n'slash genre : it can become boring REALLY fast, especially if you don't have a good story of master the art of storytelling like Blizzard (their screenplays are not original but they know how to create a universe and hook the player in it). Here, you have various classes with different beginnings, which is an excellent idea...But it stops there. Once you have finished the tutorial, you'll find yourself dragged into...something ? Because despite its interesting world, you absolutely don't care (to remain polite) of what happens, you quickly become a zombie wandering from point A to point B, hacking mobs in search of a quest. This wouldn't havbe been a problem if the game was short (10 maybe 15 hours)... Another flaw lies in the loot : too much. Too much weapons, too much armors...Moreover you pick up pieces that are not for your class so your inventory quickly becomes a real mess (fun fact : by selling all my useless sh*t, I had more 100.000 coins around the end of act 2, so why should I care to save the world ? I was a gladiator, almost a slave and now I have enough money to buy a pretty house on the coast, so solve your problems by yourself ) To be fair there is a interesting mechanic : you can use amulets or rings on your weapon to enhance them at the blacksmith, but again the informations on the effects are too scarse to really understand what it does...Or even cares about it. Too bad, because with a more classical RPG approach (with real or turn based combats) Sacred could have been an interesting game...

Are you? If so, just go back and play Diablo. Picked this up on a deep discount at GOG and likely overplayed for that. The only reason I can see to play this game is nostalgia if you enjoyed the punishment the first time around. Certain games you would play because its legendary and you missed it somehow the first time around. Others just because they were fun as a kid. This is definitely only for the folks that would choose option 2.

I've been playing this game for months, years maybe, when it first came out. It's really fun to play, both Sacred Plus content and Underworld. Sadly, the servers have been down for years but the game is still enjoyable. I have the boxed game somewhere but it's so cheap during the sale, I don't feel bad about buying it again. A few tips for the first timers: Try not to die too often because staying alive increases Survival Bonus, which increases your special items' drop, etc. Don't pull too many packs, try to keep them down to a minimum because they hit really hard. The coloured circles under each enemy shows how big level difference is there: aim for yellow to green, be careful with orange and try to avoid red. Elite circles are spiked and they hit accordingly. Take your time to learn each character. You can develop all of them either physically or magically. Check the skills and only level up those you choose to focus on and some utility skills, like jumps. Try to clear quests in one location before moving on. That will get you ahead eventually but otherwise, you'll have a bad time pushing the main story early on. The numbers in each region you see on the minimap are the kill counts for region bosses. These were fun to do with friends online It has a replay value if you can afford playing other characters or pushing the difficulty levels up to Niobium. A full clear is time consuming but it's really fun to do. A nice way to chill out, once you know the basics.

I was quite enjoying this old school RPG...until around hour 30 when it started to become incredibly repetitive. All this mission consisted of go here, collect that or go here, get person, come back. And the distances you had to travel were insane. It'd be OK if it was only a few minutes, but it would take 15 or more just to get from the mission giver-er to where you had to go. Perhaps because it's on old game on a modern(ish) system - I'm playing the GoG version - I had many instances of spells not activating or characters attacking in the wrong direction. I had two spells that didn't seem to work at all no matter how often I tried. This made things incredibly infuriating when I got to a mission that had me swarmed with enemies. I can see how people would have loved this game when it originally came out and have fond memories of it. There is heaps of replay value with all the different characters available to play as. However, I ended up just becoming extremely frustrated to the point of not wanting to continue on. I may come back to it one day, but I've a serious backlog of games and I'd rather explore more of those than push on with something I'm really not enjoying all that much.