I'm a big fan of Pharaoh, but for a proper remaster I wish for some more comfort features like turning the map, some way to look behind other buildings (e.g. by pressing Space), better road building. Spawn-points should be moveable. It should be possible to see at first glance, which gods are mad, and not just a very slight red tint of the portrait. There should be an error message, when you have debts and can't have any more festivals, nor open a trading route. You will get loads of impressions what could be added in the steam reviews or here. AND: There should be fewer bugs and flaws! In the first missions, there was no text in the mission goals (German localization). Also, the encyclopedia in the localization has the alphabetical order of the English game. It's really nice you included other languages, even with speech output, but please fix the mentioned issues. The mission goals are a bit too cryptic for my understanding. What do I have to do, to win the mission, what is wealth rating etc.? Maybe include some mouse-over explanation. The interface feels improved, but still a little clunky. The most horrible thing that happened to me was in the Campaign "Timna". Almost before I won the mission, the game began stuttering like hell. During the stutters, the game is like frozen, and it's not possible to minimize or open the game's window. Then the game runs again for a few seconds and freeze again. The freezes become longer, when you turn up the game speed. First I thought it's my PC, but it's deffo the game. It's like the path finding or whatever breaks, when your city becomes too big or when a certain message appears. Maybe it's related to military action. All the critics mentioned above are peanuts compared to this performance mess. A minimally refurbished 24-year-old game should run flawlessly!
Why 5 stars? In my opinion, the Sacred series have still got the most motivating skill & attack mechanics of all Hack-n-Slash RPG available at the moment. Although you might occur some serious issues with the graphic engine (e.g. Physx, stutter) or unfixed bugs (getting stuck by using combos) you easily become addicted to the encouraging loot, the easter eggs (graves, concert, etc.), the atmosphere on your journey through Ancaria (think about the leaves with Physx!) Suggestion: Install Wardust's textures & music files + SweetFX preset (serious light & effects) the enemy feedback (animations seem tedious, but the voice feedback of some creeps is just gorgeous, at least for the German version!) Just remember: Ascaron didn't have time to implement more features or fix additional bugs before its bankruptcy. Therefore, I can recommend using the recent Community Patch. You can also easily turn off some of the annoying features, as the repeating remarks of your avatar or the battle music and tune the config of the game as you wish. What I find most unfortunate is, that the quest descriptions aren't read out, whereby one just tends to skip the whole and follow the marks on the map. After the big disappointment of Sacred 3, everyone should reconsider their own RPG needs. Diablo III or Sacred 2? The decision depends on your attitude. Blizzard's games have lost all their complexity nowadays and don't look particularly better then Sacred 2 does. If you prefer punchy combats over complexity you might better go with Diablo 3.
