Sacred 2 Gold

Sacred 2 is a really great ARPG but most players never realise just how much it has going for it. On the surface it is a standard hack'n'slash with the camera tied to overhead views which makes the game appear merely good. However the game is infinitely customizable and if you head over to Darkmatters.org you will find pages of articles about how to mod this game. One of the best and easiest is Schott's article on how to adjust the camera angles and play it in 3rd person perspective. It makes the game seem so much better and the amount of graphical detail that can only be seen in 3rd person view is unbelievable. Also rarely mentioned is the volume, variety and complexity of the loot available in the game. There are literally hundreds of different rings, amulets, weapons and pieces of armour. All of which can be equipped and all of which have different bonuses and effects. Many of the items have slots allowing you to customize them further making truely unique items. NOt to mention the fact that each character in the game can be customized as well with different combinations of skills. Want to be a blowpipe wielding Dryad using voodoo magic and with your own personal undead pet bodyguarding you? No problem! I have been playing Sacred 2 for 5 years and am still finding new combinations of skills and equipment. In my opinion, apart from multiplayer (since the servers shut down when Askeron when broke) Sacred 2 is infinitely better than Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2!

The title is a serious question, because the game is indeed fun and entertaining in the way that Diablo was different every play through. You have quite a few classes to pick from, some more quirky and unique than others. The expansion of the ground work they provided in Sacred 1 is quite noticeable, but not unwelcome as quite a few glaring overpowered concepts have been toned down or repurposed masterfully. If you are looking for this title it is because you want something (mostly) mindless to hack and slash your way through mobs in order to fill an empty void of your day and not for much else. There is a VERY, I would almost say guaranteed, chance that you will play this entirely alone as it cannot perform multiplayer without third party software, which brings me to the whole reason this has 3 stars and not 4+. You are going to struggle getting this game to function at all. This is not a jest. The game was developed while the company went bankrupt and was able to legally delay the process until the game was completed, which ultimately meant it was rushed and riddled with bugs/inconsistencies. GOG support is going to recommend standard procedures that are within their legal limitations and rightfully so, but none of this is going to work for you. The only answer to making this game work is through third party software developed through the blood, sweat, and tears of diehard fans that want you to enjoy this game as much as they do. If you hold any interest in this game, which you should, then you need to be ready to sign up for the darkmatters.org forums for their Sacred Gold 2 community patch. This is going to correct most of the prominent issues that will prevent you from even launching the game to begin with. You are going to have to follow their advice and turn off PhysX in the options, as it only exacerbates a prominent memory leak issue that has existed since release. Before I took efforts to sign up to their forums for the community patch I had to create a text file in order to create a registry edit for the game to even recognize the correct supported language, funnily enough the intro video still used German vocals despite my efforts. Is this a lot of work for a single game, absolutely, but I suppose that is what you might expect from something that only cost $3 and came from a half-dead developer.

I was lucky enough to have just finished Sacred 2 for the very first time a few days before it was released here, so these are fresh impressions. To start with, this game has a lot of promise and the first several hours can be a blast. However, some of the most interesting classes from the first Sacred were cut out (including the ever-awesome vampiress class). Additionally, the game world is about 20 times bigger than it has any right to be, and this size serves only to make the tedious "get something at point A and bring it to point B" quests that much more maddening. There are also invisible walls and a main story with the narrative strength of most games' sidequests. Those last few were problems that the first game faced, as well, but they're problems that have actually been exacerbated in this entry. In its defense, the actual combat in the game is pretty comparable to that in the first game and it can be a lot of fun at times to hack down large groups. There are also large boss fights that are appropriately epic, and the graphics can be pleasing at times. Still, the game's virtues are constantly drowned out by its shortcomings. The voice acting is abysmal, even when compared to the first game, and you're only given a single save slot that's occasionally overwritten by autosaves, almost completely taking any control over the save situation out of your hands. I'd wait for a deep sale unless you're a die-hard fan of the franchise. Even then, the first game was better.

Sacred 2 has two major details that set it apart from the rest of the ARPG genre. First: It takes place in a gameworld comparable in size to an Elder Scrolls game. Second: there is no MP and the skill tree is flat. Where in, say, torchlight you might have to play for 5 hours before you finally unlock the skill combination your build is intended to emphasize, in Sacred 2 you can get all the skills you want within the first 15 minutes of gameplay. Builds in Sacred 2 are more about balancing the skill's base power against its recharge time. This is why at the start of the game attacks seem slow and floaty, over time your build will increase attack speed and the animations will speed up accordingly. The main reason I'm docking this game a star is the bugs. The community patch is mandatory to get this game to run properly.