Can't review, sorry. I have an x32 Win7 and the game only works on x64. While I admit I am probably in the minority of gamers with an x32 gaming computer, my desktop happens to be x32. It installed successfully, starting the game is unsuccessful. GOG does include x64 in the requirements, so don't overlook that.
Subtitles for the lyrics might help understand what I'm seeing. Of course, since I don't actually know what they are singing, maybe not :-)
I confirmed that co-op, network, 2-player works for both First and Second Encounter. GOG lists multi-player, but no co-op in the game description. GOG has listed other games as co-op. Multi-player often means PVP or team versus team. So I wasn't sure. The original game certainly supported co-op. Serious fans probably already know this, but the default graphics options is limited. To get more options, from the main menu: 1) Options - Execute Addon - Extreme 2) Video Options - Rendering Options - Enable Widescreen 3) Video Options - Preferences, set to Quality 4) Advanced Options - GFX-AdvancedRendering Then set the resolution. Much better. I only wandered about in the initial areas, what I saw looked nice. Much nicer than the quality I remember being available when I played it years ago. If you just wanna shoot, set the ammo to infinite. Explore the menus, there's lots of interesting options. Certainly, the graphics are not as good as recent games. My 5 star rating is because I'm impressed how well the graphics on this 13 year old game scaled up to a modern computer. And it is just fun to shoot and run.
My compliments to the whomever created the PDF manual. It is _not_ just a pixel scan of the manual. (Those are awful). It is a high quality PDF. The text is even selectable (mentioned to vouch for the quality, not to encourage plagiarism). Considering how old the game is, I appreciate that someone took the time to provide this quality.
There's no UM for download from GOG. Is the in-game tutorial good enough? If not, is there an English version of the UM? Perhaps a website or wiki that is good? I've already purchased the game from GOG. But I haven't played the game. The 3 stars is for the lack of a UM.
I only played Sacred as co-op over a local LAN. Original CD version. Overall, I enjoyed the game. I agree with others that the re-spawning made some parts tedious. It wouldn't be a big deal if the player did not have to re-traverse areas multiple times, but you do for the gazillion quests. The world/map is huge. I enjoyed that the character skills were very different between characters, like Diablo II. I was sad to see that the vampiress was not available in later add-ons. (and that my experience points did not carry over. Perhaps that was fixed in a patch?) We also experienced the various bugs that others have mentioned. I don't know how well the GOG version resolves them. We stopped playing because somehow the horses got out of sync between players. Without horses, travel is more tedious. We tried lots of things to get the horses back in sync to no avail. It sucks when one player has a horse but the other does not. We eventually gave up. Due to that, we did not complete the game. The game would be a 4 star to me (for a Diablo-type game), but due to the bugs I dropped it to a two star.
