Sacred Gold

Well well, so i have finally bought sacred gold after years of abstinence from this game. Back then when it came out i really liked this game since it was fun and somehow innovative; for never undstood reasons, it never worked later on, not on any of my systems. Now i bought it through gog in the hope of having a playable version of it. And there we go. I tried to play this game in the gog version, but even this fixed version is almost unplayable while random graphic bugs appear on every system i tried (i tried like 4 or 5 different systems). Well yeah, it is like just small random graphic bugs, but you cant play this game for too long with those. So all in all i did not get into the game longer than 5 minutes because of the fact that this game seems unfixable. Even gog (who does almost magic work, like on Silver) was not able to fix the buggyness of the original game, and this is sad, since it was a great game. Therefore it is not worth a buy i think, since it is one of two games who really dumped because of engine-failures (propably resulting in the very programming of the game back then), even more unplayable than Mana - Der Weg zur schwarzen Macht. In this case, I would not recommend to buy it.

Story is somewhat ok. Great Evil arises, you have to bring peace etc pp. Still a great game gameplaywise. Original language (German) is not available (There are some licensing problems). I heard rumors that in the internet exists somewhere a german patch...

Normally "traditional" RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Diablo, etc. aren't my cup of tea, for whatever reasons. But for some reason upon trying out the Sacred demo upon seeing GOG's sale on the game here, I knew within minutes this was something I wanted. The game just does everything as it should be done. Progress is extremely open-ended (if your attention span leaves something to be desired, Sacred's zillion sidequests will definitely work for you), the menus and controls are all very intuitive (easy to pick up, with lots of depth to be explored over time), the graphics aren't too shabby, music is beautiful and used sparingly, and combat/leveling is frequent and satisfying. But most importantly, Sacred is as fun as it is addictive. It doesn't happen for me too often -- but this is one of those games once I picked up, it's something I couldn't keep myself away from (indeed, I'm itching to play as I write this). For the original game plus two expansions, and minus the DRM it originally came with, this is a steal. If you were on the fence about Sacred, try the demo -- there's a good chance you'll surprise yourself with how much you like it.

Sacred is almost excellent. There's a lot of fun to be had in exploring the wide world and killing heaps of monsters, but there's one significant flaw if you ask me: the item system tries to be "better than Diablo 2", but it's not very thorougly polished. There's too much clutter and useless items in drops, and another problem is that you may get 10 different kinds of bonuses in one item, but they may all be very diminutive in power. Some bonuses (and skills) have very unclear descriptions, and you have to guess if some things stack or not, etc. Makes comparing stuff hard. There are way too many magic item properties that are obscure and very useless - like "2% of Dexterity Dealt as Fire Damage Against Skeletons" and all possible variations...I realize that people want to try and make different kinds of character builds, but these types of ridiculously marginal bonuses are just too much micromanaging. Also, the dropped items have names that should vary logically according to their attributes like in Diablo 2, but they don't. They are just random, and there are very few variations (there was even some axe that was named "Sword of..." something...) Doesn't break the game, but feels very cheap. Overall the game is haunted with a fair amount of cheesyness. If you can set these things aside however, and not compare too much to Diablo 2, Sacred is quite a bit of fun. The character classes are diverse enough (and the Seraphim has high heels ;D), the combat is fun to play most of the time, and especially with a friend online, one can get drawn in for a long time with this game. There are so many side quests in this game that you surely won't run out of things to do. Aside from the item system, the technical production brings Sacred past average level.

This game tries to be like Diablo but different and succeeds and fails in different areas. This game is not easy to understand. It appears to guide you but not really. First if you haven't played the game, there is really only one class you should play: the battle mage. Second the game hints that you should get as many runes and read/eat them immediately. This is a terrible move as the more runes you eat the less you find. You have to decide your path ahead of time and only eat those and only level up if you absolutely need to (attacks only typically). Runes are for embedding in equipment for the most part. Third there are horses to ride. They give you more hp. They're fast. They're useless. Your attack speed goes way down and, at the beginning at least, you can't out run opponents on a horse. Which means they all gang up on you when you stop. Don't buy a horse; buy tons of healing potions. The main object of the game is to build your character with the right skills, items and combat arts so he or she will kick butt. Explore the beautiful world. The world is very detailed like the world in Diablo with great graphics and sound design. The story is not great but it's mostly background so it doesn't matter as it's not central like in Diablo. At what the game does it mostly succeeds, at what it pretends to do it mostly doesn't. It lacks the polish, the story and the coherence of a game like Diablo. Play it to build your great character, play it to explore the non-randomly generated world, play it to find all the items for your set. Forget the story, ignore the bugs and really pay no attention to what the game recommends you do, and you'll enjoy it.